Online Blogging for Business -1

Blogging for business is a more serious work then writing and updating personal blogs. There can be so many options to choose from to start a business blog. A entrepreneur must decide the target audience and what this blog will offer to them. This is the basic ground on which rest of the blogging depends.

Choosing the platform for Business Blogs

Deciding the platform for blog i.e. whether it should be hosted on a free site like Google’s blogspot or WordPress or Typead or self hosted using third part tools is the first step of blogging.  A blog with quality contents and relevant article will anyway succeed in the long run.

Google’s Blogspot Blogs : Blogger is one of the easiest way to start and learn blogging. Everything is ready and easily manageable from choosing a blog name to selecting a ready made template.  A blog at blogger is also easy to promote as there are a number of blogs on every topic and for industry specific. Anyone can read them and follow them to learn and also get some followers from the blogspot.

Blogger’s blog can also be linked to a customized domain or sub-domain and the contents can be easily imported and exported from it. There is also a negligible chance of any technical errors or data losses at Blogger. It is free yet a powerful blogging solution. There many good blogs which are hosted on blogspot and rank high in SERP.

The additional benefit of starting a blog at blogger instead of wordpress or any other platform is that they can be easily shifted to

1) WordPress platform and

2) Linked to a custom domain name or sub-domain

WordPress Blogs : WordPress is another popular blogging platform which is based on an open source blog publishing software which works on PHP (coding support) and SQL (database support). WordPress is a free platform which can also be hosted for free at wordpress.com with some limitations.

A wordpress blog is a feature rich blog which is highly customizable. The power of wordpress lies in

1) its Theme and

2) Plugins (utilities that extend its functionality in a number of ways).

A number of themes are available for free which can be customized to suit requirement of a business or they can be designed at nominal charges.

WordPress is not that much suitable for a beginner (if he/she is not interested in learning), it can also get corrupted occasionally due to database errors or security issues. A wordpress blog can be imported and exported, just like a blog on blogger but we cannot shift a wordpress blog to blogger.  More information on WordPress can be had from Wikipaedia. This blog is itself based on a WordPress blogging platform.

Others (like blogger)

Hosted Solutions for Blogging

• doomby
• Posterous
• LiveJournal
• Maneno
• Moxietype
• MySpace
• Open Diary
• Skyrock
• Tumblr
• TypePad
• Windows Live Spaces

Open Source Blogging Platforms

Other platforms : Some of these are also available with most shared hosting packages

• b2evolution (PHP/MySQL)
• blosxom (Perl)
• Dotclear (PHP)
• DotNetNuke (VB.NET/ASP.NET)
• Drupal (PHP)
• Elgg (PHP)
• Frog CMS (PHP)
• Habari (PHP)
• Jaws (PHP)
• Joomla! (PHP)
• LifeType (PHP)
• Livejournal (Perl)
• Movable Type (Perl)
• Nucleus CMS (PHP)

So, there are a number of choices and options for starting a online business blog. All of these platform do not offer same level of reliability, support and customization. It depends on choice of an entrepreneur and business requirement as most of these platform are supported by a community and therefore also a matter for consideration.

Introductory information for beginners on writing blogs for earning money. This is all for 1st part of Online Blogging for Business.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogging for business, blogging platform, blogging tool, business blog, online blogging, php, wordpress, wordpress blog