How Your Chosen Blogging Platform Can Impact Your Online Goals

Blogging is made out of moving parts that you can twist and turn to your liking. Aside from establishing a content strategy for your blog’s foundation, you need to select the best and most appropriate blogging platform for you.

But just like any moving part in blogging, the choice is never always easy. There are multiple blogging platforms to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is not simply about picking off the most popular or widely used platform from the litter (in this case, it’s WordPress) because it all boils down on what you wish to achieve with your blog.

By determining your online goals, you will be able to choose the blogging platform that suits your objectives, as well as skills. Goals like increasing your leads, customers, or sales figures can depend on the platform you are using in running your blog.

If you are a beginner at blogging and wish to find out which platform will help you achieve your goals faster given your current skills, below are questions that you will need to answer for yourself.

Do you want a robust platform that allows for customization?

As bloggers, there is a need for you to control every aspect of your blog, from appearance to content. Having this privilege allows you to edit and customize your blog to your liking. This also lets you add bells and whistle to make your blog stand out from the pack.

If you feel comfortable with full-scale customization, then WordPress is for you. This platform is relatively easy to edit and modify by reading through its comprehensive documentation for developers such as writing the API, developing a theme, and more.

But even if you’re not into web development, there’s a lot to like about WordPress. What makes this platform one of the most popular and downloaded are the wealth of plugins available for download. There are plugins for lead generation, ecommerce, email optin forms, and others that are tailor-made to help you reach your goals.

Caveat: Not much of an issue, but most of the websites nowadays are powered using the blogging platform. There’s no denying the power of WordPress as your CMS, but it’s made much more difficult to rise above the pack knowing that at least 23% of websites run on this platform.

Do you want an easy to design site?

A gripe that bloggers may have with platforms is the inability to design a one-and-off blog and just focus on writing and producing content. These platforms cater to more than just bloggers because you have to worry about their appearance, widgets, and usability.

This is the reason why website builders like Wix and Weebly are made available to non-designing bloggers. Instead of editing code to modify the blog’s appearance and functions, the drag-and-drop feature allows bloggers to pick off an element from the site editor and drag it down to a specific portion of the web page. This way, bloggers won’t have to learn code and just build a website right off the bat.

Caveat: There’s a reason why website builders are called as such – it builds websites, not blogs. The ability to create a blog is just part of what website builders offers. This means blogging isn’t a main feature for these builders, which also means a limited experience for bloggers.

Do you want to just write and get posts published?

There was a time when blogging was about getting your ideas across. With the ability to make money off your blog and build a brand presence for businesses, blogging platforms have evolved into sophisticated publishing softwares that provide users to achieve more. This may leave a bad taste to the mouths of bloggers who simply want to worry about publishing great content on their blogs.

This is why Ghost, Medium, and the upcoming platform Typed have been developed in recent years. These platform bring back blogging in blogging platform. Upon signing up for an account, you can just write your article, story, essay, or any writtent content and hit “Publish” once you’re done. The clean and beautiful approach to the blog design keeps things simple for you – no widgets and plugins necessary!

Caveat: If you want to do more than just blog, then the platform listed above which strictly focus on publishing content aren’t for you.

Final thoughts: Using the questions to help you answer your priorities and your preferences, you will be able to get a better idea on which blogging platforms will help you reach your goals faster.