What in your opinion is the best blog platform?

Well the is no correct answer to this question honestly. Most will give you a direct answer if you ask them and when you ask a blogger with over10 years of experience their answer might be influenced by the tools they use.

Here are some questions wannabe bloggers (noob bloggers) need to consider when they select a platform for blogging:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. What sort of content are you going to create?
3. Are you going to curate content?
4. Which platform will give you maximum traffic?
5. SEO/SEM: Based on the content (audio, video, images or just text) which blogging platform gives you maximum search engine support?
6. Do you plan to work with a lot of audio, video files?
7. Do you want total control over your content or maximum traffic?
8. Most important question: Is this copyrighted content or do you plan to use the Creative Commons license?

The Explanations:

A) Different blogging platforms target different types of audiences?

Facebook Notes:13 to65 all sectors within B2C.

Twitter:16 to45 media/arts/natural sciences, professionals, students, slacktivists, politicians to name a few.

Pinterest: Women between16-45

Youtube: It has a very diverse audience.

Google+: Professionals who use Google Hangouts, Google Apps

Quora:16-65, great for thought leadership and talking directly the world's leading names.

Linkedin: university students to industry professionals, investors, consultants to name a few.

Behance: Creative industry professionals showcasing portfolio, Adobe community.

DeviantArt: Creative industry professionals showcasing portfolio to sell their services.

Bitly: Blogging through social bookmarks and content curation.

Slideshare: ebooks, whitepapers, presentations, project documentation around your blog.

EverNote: lists, posts, images for your personal diary that can be shared with a selected few.

Ghost: Content Management System, Self-hosting option, fully customizable.

Tumblr: Teenagers, of all interests supports audio and video.

Instagram:13-45, selfies sndrome, group selfies, pop culture.

Vine:16-45, pop culture

Secret: varied audience, opinions, rants, citizen journalism

About.Me: Professionals showcasing their skills

Whisper: varied audience, opinions, rants, citizen journalism

Wordpress: Content Management System, Self-hosting option, fully customizable.17-19% of world content os hosted on Wordpress due to excellent integration with Google SEO.

B)

For VIDEO

You need to decide what sort of content you want to create. For video, you also have Vimeo, DailyMotion as options as well besides Youtube.

-- Vimeo is great for personal branding.

-- DailyMotion is useful where Youtube is blocked.

For PODCASTING (ie. AUDIO ONLY)

Checkout SoundCloud and Archive.Net

For IMAGES only with a touch of video you can checkout WeLoveIt besides Pinterest.

C)

If you plan to CURRATE CONTENT have a look at the these platforms that allow you to push content to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in some cases:

-- Nuzzel

-- Scoop.it

-- TweetedTimes

D)

The platforms that give you maximum traffic are the ones that are searchable through Google Blog Search these include:

-- Facebook

-- Twitter

-- Linkedin

-- Youtube

-- Vimeo

-- Pinterest

-- Slideshare.net

-- Scribd

-- Content Management Systems that are out there (They are the best options to consider)

E) 

G)

If you want total control over your content then definitely opt for WordPress (CMS) hosted on a blog hosting of you choice.

If you decide to opt for WordPress, BlueHost andiPage are the best in the industry.

Other CMS that lead in the personal and non-industry specific SME includes Drupal.

If you want to build a community then convert your blog into a Forum. The leaders in the market include:

-- Invision Power Boards (single lifetime license is available)

-- Phpbb (open source)

-- vBulletin (one time fee) 

 I hope an employer comes across this post. Fingers crossed.

WordPress

My verdict: The best place to blog if you’re serious about it. Good for all types of review websites, mommy blogs, company sites, eCommerce sites and more.

Blogger

My verdict: Everything blogging should be and more – Blogger was the sandbox for names now headlining in tech. The only real negative comes from outgrowing Blogger, at which point many (like myself) transfer to WordPress. Less popular today – even Google’s PR Mogul Matt Cutts runs a WordPress site.

Tumblr

My verdict: Great for photography and other forms of art. Super-simplistic designs and a whimsical vibe make Tubmlr a great choice for any new blogger.

SquareSpace

My verdict: Less hands-on than WordPress but arguably better advertising and accessibility – Squarespace gets your business site up quickly. A good quick solution.

Google+

My verdict: Absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to be considered an expert in any field. Fun. Challenging. If you’re curious, I’ve also written on how to master Google Plus over at Social Media Explorer.

Medium

My verdict: Probably won’t reach the development status of WordPress.org but definitely chomping at the heels of Blogger, Tumblr and even Twitter as it borrows several of their services, like topic searches and nostalgic photo shares from the founders themselves.

Hubpages

My verdict: A solid place to start writing and learn from other experts. Tightly-knit. Fun for everyone involved.

Joomla

My verdict: Only really for a Joomla developer or website manager. Not an easy access point for a beginner.

Live Journal

My verdict: In mother Russia, blog write on you.

Quora

My verdict: If you’re passionate about a topic but don’t have the time to maintain a blog, submitting questions and answers to Quora discussions is a great compromise.

Typepad

My verdict: Just love the news? If so, know that ABC, BBC, CBS, MSNBC and more use Typepad to maintain blogs.

Weebly

My verdict: I’ve heard a lot of positive reviews here. For a company owner who needs a website but despises tech, it’s Weebly or Squarespace, and both are sound choices.

Drupal

My verdict: Fun for developers and bloggers with a real interest in building code.

Squidoo

My verdict: A classy place to meet others before you get more serious about blogging.

Postach.io

My verdict: Too soon to form a verdict here!

Facebook Notes

My verdict: Not much different from a Facebook page – I predict this to be a feature Facebook tries, directs advertisers to, then slowly wanders away from.

Svbtle

My verdict: They are a “network of great people who want to make it easier for people to share and discover new ideas”. Excited to see where Svbtle goes in the next few months.

Sett

My verdict: I’ve always believed it’s the readers who really grow a blog, not so much the blogger him/herself.80/20. So I’m excited here. Will they win the battle for3rd place? Either way, the web is always better with more variety, more options, more places to blog.

Ghost

My verdict: Got to respect their lofty ideas. But, I suspect they are trying to KO WordPress and possibly backed by BlueHost based on their web design, so I oppose :)

Posthaven

My verdict: They’re a group of engineers who want to build blogs for us. Love this idea and wish them the best. But as a company you just can’t get ahead in an open environment like blogging by trying to control things, at least not upfront. Their technology might be great and “durable” but most of us will never know, because their marketing is a zero and their homepage design is really weak.

Posterous

My verdict: You’d hope a domain name as strong as blog.com would produce a winner…

Zoomshare

My verdict: Not enough information to form a verdict.

Xanga

My verdict: Not enough information to form a verdict.

So these are among the best ones available on the Internet.

So for a beginner I would suggest Blogger to start of their blogging career.

I started blogging with Blogspot's platform and it helped me understand numerous things, (like widgets, designs, customization options, display styles etc) but then I switched to WordPress. Wordpress is much more professional than Blogspot because of multiple integration (which are available), for SEO reasons, for different other sophisticated reasons as well.. If you really want to start blogging and want to continue for a longer period of time then go for WordPress (now I realize, why waste time on Blogspot, if in future you want to run your blog / site on wordpress?) It's like learning all the relevant things on wordpress's platform from the start... 

Hi Samar, 

I can speak about my own experience, I started using Blogspot when I opened my blog, after less than a year I improved my knowledge about blogging so I decided to move to Wordpress platform. Blogspot is surely easier to use, and it's fine for a fresh start, but Wordpress is really more compleate in its .org version. 

I can suggest you to try with the free version of Wordpress, after a while when you start to feel confortable with it and you need to improve it, adding particular plug-in, you can buy a domani, download the .org version and make your blog more complete. 

Online you can find a lot of tutorials which can certainly help you in the beginning. 

Hope that I helped you at least a bit. 

Good luck!