There are good reasons to start a blog for your startup: to keep customers updated, to establish yourself as an expert on a subject matter, even generate useful content that helps rank you in search engines.
Once you come up with ideas and create a content plan, you are going to need to decide on a blogging platform.
How to Pick a Blogging Platform
There are a key factors that will influence your choice of a blogging platform. While I could spend time on an article to each of these, I’ll save that for another day, and just leave you with a brief summary.
Here are five things I consider when choosing a blogging platform:
Cost to set up and maintain
Ease of use
Customizability
Distribution
Speed and scalability
You should weigh each of these factors based on your needs and the team who will be managing the blog.
Startup Blogging Platforms
Setting up a blog doesn’t have to be a headache - there are many platforms out there that will help you build a professional-looking one. Below I’ve collected a few of the best options for your startup.
Squarespace ($12) - Squarespace is perfect for non-technical people who need a website. It works well for basic landing pages as it does for a full-featured website and blog.
LinkedIn Publishing ($0) - LinkedIn has a publishing tool that allows anyone to write blog posts that are immediately shared with their LinkedIn network and profile. You don’t get any options for customizing your posts or calls to actions, but it’s simple and gets automatic distribution.
Contentful ($0) - Contentful can be used as a complete content management system with an API that will hook into your site. I would only recommend for developers.
Drupal ($0) - Free, open-source, and built on PHP, Drupal is a full-fledged content management system with a huge community. It’s more flexible than WordPress in many ways, but also requires more work to customize.
Ghost ($0) - An open-source NodeJS blogging platform, Ghost can be installed on your server or you can use Ghost Pro to let them serve it up. In either case, Ghost provides a nice looking theme and great option for customizing your blog.
Medium ($0) - Medium has become really popular for startup blogs. While you don’t get to customize the look of your blog, it gets some free distribution on Medium.com
Postach.io ($9) - Allows you to use Evernote as your blog’s backend.
Tumblr ($0) - Tumblr is simple and customizable, plus you can make it work with your own subdomain. The community features also give you some built-in distribution although it’s less popular than Medium today.
Weebly ($0) - Weebly is a great all-in-one website and blog creator with many templates and tools to choose from.
Wix ($0) - Wix gives you everything you need for a stunning website or blog and it’s free.
WordPress.com ($0) - This is a hosted blogging service. It makes setup easier, but allows for less flexibility and includes fewer plug-in options than WordPress.org
WordPress.org ($0) - While you’ll have to install WordPress on your own server, hosting is usually cheap. The biggest downside to WordPress now is the spam that shows up because it’s so popular.
Write.as ($0) - Quick, free (or cheap to upgrade), does custom domains, custom CSS, and it’s easy to create a bunch of blogs from one account if you upgrade.
Did I miss your favorite blogging platform? Email me and let me know so I can add it to the list.
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