Starting Your Own Blog: Three Free Options

As we’ve written numerous times here on the ReputationDefender Blog, starting a blog for yourself or your company is a great way to begin controlling your reputation online and proactively building your professional brand.

We’re not going to spend another post extolling the virtues of creating a blog, however. (If you don’t see the value in having an online presence by now, you probably never will.) Instead, today, we’re going to explain how to actually begin your own blog, highlighting three of the most well-known free blogging tools on the web.

BLOGGER

Blogger is Google’s free blog publishing tool and, somewhat expectedly, it’s pretty great. While we do occasionally criticize Google on this blog when it comes to data privacy and other issues, it is hard to deny the quality of the company’s products and Blogger is no exception.

Offering a blogging experience that is simple and accessible for any user (much like Google’s industry-leading search), Blogger allows users to customize their blogs through a fairly intuitive drag and drop interface. Blogger also allows more advanced functionality for experienced web users who want to add customized CSS. Another advantage of setting up a free blog through Google’s Blogger is that it makes it easier for you to insert certain common Google tools, such as Google Analytics and Google AdSense, to help monitor your blog’s traffic and earn advertising revenue from your website.

When I first began blogging four years ago, I used Blogger. While I have since moved on to a different platform, I found it to be very easy to use and a great way to learn the basics of blogging.

WORDPRESS

WordPress is my personal favorite blogging platform, and the one that I use in almost all of my professional and personal writing. The thing that I like about WordPress, besides the fact that it’s free, is that it’s incredibly dynamic and offers a wide variety of customization options. WordPress is always nice in the way that you can easily set it up so that your blog is hosted under your own domain instead of a subdomain (of course, you’ll have to buy the domain name you want and pay to have it hosted).

While there is a lot of freedom to design your own template from scratch, WordPress offers a host of good looking pre-designed layouts that are easy to install and offer rich customization. When you factor in how many WordPress templates are available on the web at large, it’s hard to imagine a beginner blogger having a hard time picking out a look that works for them.

Another great aspect of WordPress is that it can also be used as a light Content Management System (CMS) for editing and updating other components of your website besides your blog. Using this feature of WordPress requires a bit more advanced understanding of web design, so if you’re a newbie to the blog world, you may have to ask a friend for help or study up.

TUMBLR

Tumblr is a unique blogging platform that combines some of the traditional functionality of a web blog with the more real-time aspects of other social networking websites such as Twitter. Like Twitter, Tumblr users can follow each other and easily republish content from someone else that they like. While this has made for a very active community of users, it has also led to some problems related to Internet defamation.

In some cases, users will set up Tumblr accounts with the express purpose of reblogging the work of someone they dislike and then mocking their posts. Despite this problem, however, the basic spirit of Tumblr’s reblogging feature is in keeping with recent developments in social media technology.

The ability to easily add diverse content, including images, audio, video, and text, is a big reason for Tumblr’s success. Though considerably younger than the other two blogging platforms we have talked about (Tumblr was founded in 2007) the website has already attracted a loyal and vocal community of users.