Best Free Sites for a Blog
Blogging is a way to share your knowledge and help people get informed. Do you want to start blogging for free but you don’t know what sites to use? In this article, I will show you the best free blogging sites you can start using immediately.
Blogging has a long and rich history. Since 1993, people have been creating blogs both as a hobby and as those that generate income or help promote a business.
Since you are here on the page, you are interested in creating your own blog. You want to share your knowledge with the world, your hobby or even write a story. Or you might want to start a niche blog as a side income to earn money outside of your daily work.
Recommended>>> Free WordPress Blog Setup Service
Free Blog Warning: There is a disadvantage to using a free blogging platform. You have very limited control over your content, and it is difficult to export it if you decide to switch to your own blogging platform.
Generally speaking, if you want a platform where you can express your views and have no intention of making money, then a free blogging platform should be the right choice for you. However, if you have the intention of making money online, you should go with a paid blogging solution like wordpress.org.
The only free blogging platform that gives a little flexibility in terms of earning money via third-party ads like Google Adsense, Pop up ads, etc are blogger and Tumblr. You can read How to Create a Blog for Free on Google and Earn Money.
Let’s get started
Best Free Blogging Platforms to use
1. WordPress
wordpress.com free blogging platform
This is the most popular blogging platform, WordPress offers a free and premium platform.
Although WordPress is free on both sites, you will have to purchase web hosting if you are downloading from WordPress. org. For the free version, visit WordPress.com and open your account.
Like Blogger.com, WordPress. com offers a huge set of free themes and the ability to customize your website/blog.
Advantages of WordPress. com Platform:
- Ability to use a custom domain (although there is an annual fee for this)
- All maintenance takes care of you: security, updates, spam filters and backups-
- Huge set of free blog themes
- Disadvantages WordPress.com
- You can’t install custom plugins with the free plan.
- While you can change the theme, you can’t customize the themes to suit your needs.
- You can’t use Google Analytics with a free data plan
- You can’t monetize your blog with Google AdSense Ads
- You can’t use your own domain for free
- To customize your themes and use the plugins of your choice, you’ll need to buy a premium plan
- Again, if you have any commercial intentions or want to make money from your blog, you’ll want to go with self-service WordPress.org.
2. Blogger
Blogger is a free blogging platform from Google. And it’s extremely popular. There are millions of blogs running on this free platform.
Advantages of Blogger:
- Easy to set up
- Lots of free templates and designs
- You don’t need to know or use your own code
- Unlimited access to HTML and CSS.
Disadvantages of Blogger
- There are very few official topics, and they are also of low quality. Third-party themes are not bad, but they are few and far between.
- Only 15 GB of free storage is shared with Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Docs.
- Very difficult to implement On the SEO page.
- You’ll often be messing around with the codes to add features.
- Blogger is best suited for informational blogs. E-commerce features are very limited on this platform, and not a suitable platform for any type of business activity.
3. Tumblr
Blogging on Tumblr is probably one of the easiest ways to start blogging. It is an alternative free blogging site that currently hosts 518.7 million different blogs, and was most recently acquired by Automatic (the company behind WordPress). Like Medium, Tumblr is a mix of a blog and a social media channel.
Considered a micro-blogging platform, you can blog just a sentence or a full dissertation – it’s up to you. Many Tumblr blogs focus on sharing photos on a specific topic.
Advantages of blogs on Tumblr.com:
- Use your own domain
- Blog directly from your mobile device, desktop or via email
- Enjoy total traffic from your network – by opening up your content to your huge audience
- With the exception of some premium themes, all of its features are free.
- Ability to use your own domain at no additional cost.
- You can also customize your theme, as Tumblr provides access to your blog’s HTML and CSS.
- You can use Google AdSense to earn money
Disadvantages
- Its interface is very confusing for a beginner and may take some time to learn.
- You can’t use your affiliate links on your Tumblr account. Tumblr can delete your blog if you do so.
- Managing your internal SEO is extremely difficult.
- If you decide to use Tumblr for blogging, I highly suggest using a separate website for your main business pages, products, etc. That is, use the Tumblr blog as a source of traffic to your main site.
4. Weebly
Weebly is more of a drag-and-drop website builder than a blogging platform. However, it does allow you to create a blog along with some free blogging themes. It offers both free and premium services. Free services have the Weebly branding and some usage restrictions.
Pros of Weebly
- The drag-and-drop page builder is very easy to use.
- You can edit many free themes using the page builder.
Cons of Weebly
More like a drag-and-drop website builder, Weeb doesn’t have a CMS and therefore limited blogging features.
You can’t use a personal domain with a free data plan
Premium plans are more expensive than the cost of starting a self-hosted blog on WordPress
Moving your blog to Self-Hosted WordPress is extremely difficult.
5. Medium
Medium is a blogging site founded by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. It was created with the goal of providing users with a platform that provides more than 140 Twitter characters.
Unlike Blogger or WordPress, Medium displays your blog posts on its home page, with the latest and most popular posts coming in the top. This ensures that your blog post gets a lot of attention. For this reason, many small businesses prefer to use Medium as a blogging platform.
Advantages
- Easily create a blog.
- You can use your own domain at no additional cost
- Medium can promote your blog post to other mid-level users and drive traffic to your blog.
- Just like on Twitter, on Medium, you can tag other bloggers with @ mentions so they get notified about it.
- It is a means of getting backlinks.
Disadvantages of the average - Very limited customization options.
- You can’t monetize your blog with Google AdSense
- As with other free blogs, there are very few opportunities for on-page SEO optimization
- Although Medium is very lenient about affiliate links, Terms and Conditions prohibits writing articles for affiliate marketing only
- A nice sign-up feature using an existing Facebook or Twitter account is that Medium automatically imports your followers into the network on Medium.
Similar to Tumblr, I wouldn’t recommend using Medium as your primary online workplace, but would consider using it as a traffic source; blogging to reach new audiences who didn’t know about you otherwise – and bring them back to your site.
6. Wix
Wix is a free website builder very similar to Weebly. It was founded in 2006 and is considered one of the best website developers.
Although Wix is primarily designed for creating static websites, it has several blog templates that you can use to create your own blog. For non-blogging templates, you can also add a blog in the website builder. You can also integrate your Tumblr blog feeds into Wix, which can be edited from both Wix and Tumblr.
Advantages of Wix
- Easy to use for people with less technical knowledge
- High-quality site templates
- It has an app store from which you can get newsletter tools, chat tools, etc.
Cons of Wix
- After selecting a template, you can’t change it
- You can’t use multiple templates for the same website.
- You can’t add a personal domain with a free account
- You can’t move your site or blog pages from Wix. Although blog posts can be moved using the RSS importer.
- You can’t delete Wix ads in the free pricing plan.
- Paid plans are very expensive, starting at $ 29 per month.
7. LiveJournal
LiveJournal is one of the oldest blogging sites, which was launched in 1999. In addition to the blogging feature, it provides you with updates and news from various magazines around the world.
LiveJournal allows you to blog anonymously. So if you want to remain anonymous, you might want to consider Livejournal.
Advantages of LiveJournal
- LiveJournal allows you to configure
- Creating a blog post is easy
- Available in different languages
- Ability to run an anonymous blog
Disadvantages of LiveJournal
- While it’s easy to create a message, formatting it is a bit difficult.
- No professional themes are available
- Ads in the free version
Source: Ideapify