Selecting The Right Blog Platform

      Got your niche? Great! The next thing then is to think about actually setting up your new site and getting started with your content. To do this, you will need to choose a ‘blogging platform’ which effectively dictates how your site’s code will be structured and what you’ll see when you’re logging
in and adding content.

Now, of course, you don’t actually need a ‘blogging platform’ as such. You can go about building your own website from scratch which will involve creating pages in HTML and CSS, possibly using a builder like ‘Dreamweaver’ but if you do this it will take a lot longer and be much harder to create something that looks and performs like a professional website.

Instead, then, you want to use a blogging platform/CMS. CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’ and is essentially a tool that simplifies the process of designing and building your website, as well as adding and editing content as needed.

Use a CMS and you won’t need to know a line of code in order to build the site, add new posts, and edit your existing content. This of course saves a lot of time, streamlines the process and it ensures that your site is at least functional.

Choosing Your CMS

 So how do you choose a CMS?
The first thing to do is to recognize the difference between hosted and self-hosted
options.

A hosted option is a blog platform that you use almost like a social network. In other words, you create your account and ‘sign in’ to another website, and from there, you’ll then be able to add new posts for other users to see. In other words, the platform and so your website is already hosted somewhere online, meaning you don’t need to pay for a hosting account to
get started.

Genuine instances of facilitated publishing content to a blog stage incorporate BlogSpot 
(www.blogspot.com), LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com), WordPress  Facilitated (www.wordpress.com), WordPress Self-Hosted  (www.wordpress.org), and Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). Every one of them has qualities and shortcomings, however, they all do basically exactly the same thing. Tumblr here is actually the oddball as it rides the line between contributing to a blog stage and web-based media stage – and as it mostly centers around pictures that you transfer instead of composed substance.

The great thing about this is that it’s a completely free process and requires absolutely no set-up. You simply visit the blogging platform, be that BlogSpot or WordPress, sign in, and then start posting! You can make changes to your blog in terms of the way it looks but you’ll be quite limited in terms of what you can do. Likewise, you’ll also be limited in terms of your URL – meaning that you won’t be able to call your website ‘BodybuildingNewsArticles.com’ – instead, your blog will have to be

‘wordpress.bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’ or ‘blogspot.bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’. This of course looks far less professional and it also means your URL is going to be far less catchy and brandable. People will likely not remember your URL and type it back into the address bar – they’ll have to search on Google. And that said, even searching on Google will be harder seeing as it’s not as easy to get hosted websites to ‘rank’.

For all these reasons you’re much better off with a self-hosted CMS. This means you’ll need to pay for the hosting space too as well as a domain name. In all, this will likely set you back $100-$500 for the year but if you monetize well you should be able to make that make even in year one. If you plan on becoming a professional blogger, this is really a mandatory expense.