It used to be around the year 2000 or so that blog platforms were scant and outside the mainstream. I remember Blogger.com. I used it to start a blog something like a personal website with photos and written vignettes of family experiences and such. It was free, and since I didn’t know much about blogging, I thought every color and feature I saw was a really cool bell or whistle. Still, I found the interface cumbersome in comparison to my Geocities account, so I let the blog lie dormant . . . as did millions of others I might add.
It became commonplace to find “dead” blogs in searches. It’s getting better with Google technologies, but when Technorati exclaims there are 71 million blogs, I would wager a bet that at least half of those are dead or should be killed because they make no contribution to the blog community.
In addition, most of those are just journals that aren’t trying to make money and aren’t trying to provide quality “authoritative” content.
So that long introduction brings us to the title of this part of the series: “Platform and Essentials.” There is nothing telling new bloggers what the essentials of blogging are. At the same time, every free blog host or paid tells the user that their service is the best. I won’t claim to say I know the best, but I’ll give you my opinion after 7 months of trying virtually all of them.
Free Blog Hosts limit the blogger. Not only do they lack the ability to hack the internal and external aspects of the blog, but they also turn off some readers who know what their free templates look like. Now I’ve written about this already and taken some flack about it by good bloggers who choose to remain on them. People should do what they want. If you spend a long time making an authoritative blog you will get your feathers ruffled if you’re told it has problems. One problem I’ll mention real quick is the fact that free blogger domains are easy to blackball at schools and libraries or even by isp’s for that matter. Your blog may not be accessible to you rreaders if you are on a free host. This doesn’t mean the content is bad.
This is an important point. I will keep a blog on my reader if it has good engaging writing whether it has a paid platform or a free one. Having said that, I think (and this is just my opinion) a writer who feels she/he has something to say would invest the 6-10 bucks a month to produce a higher quality blog product and avoid alienating readers turned off by free platforms. If you must go the free route, I’d recommend one:
- Wordpress.com
Notice I put Wordpress.com, this is COMPLETELY different from Wordpress.ORG which is a pay for host, aka “self-hosted” free software. In other words, you buy the server space and install the free software from Wordpress.org on your computer.
That leads me to my true recommendation. There are hundreds of host servers out there vying for your business. Most are $6-10 a month for a ton of cool services. The Host I use is “TopClassHost.com” They are awesome, and at $6.95 a month, they can’t be beat. GoDaddy.com is also an amazing company I recommend for domain name purchase as well as storage.
Getting on board with your Wordpress.org software will be the most exciting part of your blogging journey. You can search thousands of free themes (aka templates) on the web and change them several times until you find the one that suits you. Wordpress.org has tons of tutorials to help you learn the interface. My advice is to install 2 blogs: one to practice on that won’t “ping” your practicing to the search engines.
Next, you can start perfecting the look of your blog and energizing it from within through plugins. (41 of which I recommend in this post) But, as with many things in life, you’ll never have success without the proper planning.
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I'm Damien Riley, author and teacher. Here you'll find "think outside the box" posts on psychology and inspiration. 
