Want to know how to start blogging and make it a career as well?
Well, take this as a sign, and here are some free blogging platforms that you can start with.
2022 has a lot to offer for the blogging community with free blogging platforms. We have WordPress to build a website. And in the creation of a subscriber community, all that’s needed is Ghost or Substack. To get access to a built-in audience, you have Medium. Whatever your goal, maybe there is a free blogging platform to help you out.
WordPress.org (Self-Hosted WordPress)
WordPress is used in more than 40% of websites. Though WordPress started as a blogging site and now emerged as a website builder it’s still a great free blogging platform. This also gives you an option to expand your site in the future.
To help you do this, there are thousands of best WordPress themes and plugins available and they are mostly free of cost.
Though WordPress software is free, the hosting is not. Free hosting is available and you can use it if blogging is your hobby but for professional blogging, paid hosting is recommended. And all it could cost is $5 per month. There are some great hosting providers for a cheaper price
Medium
Medium is a combination of publisher and blogging platforms. All you have to do is to sign up and post your write-up. But the difference is, in Medium you are publishing it so there are chances that your work could be featured to its readers. Which is nothing less than getting featured in a magazine.
It is great for a beginner to access this built-in audience but if you want to make a living out of this, then you might want to have your site using something like WordPress to access more people.
WordPress.com
WordPress.org/self-hosted that as mentioned above is an open-source
and non-profit venture whereas WordPress.com is under the company named Automattic for the for-profit venture.
It’s simpler to create a blog site here but it’s not as flexible as wordpress.org. But this could be solved in the paid plan. One cool feature is that this allows you to create a subdomain like yourblog.wordpress.com. You’ll get more such features in the paid version.
Substack
Substack is a new platform that’s getting more attention because of big named journalists wanting to make a solo career like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.
Substack is nothing but a free blogging platform with built-in email functionality. When you publish a blog it is posted on your site but also your subscribers will receive them in an email.
One good thing that substack does is that it focuses on generating a paid recurring subscriber and it’s a built-in feature so you don’t have to have any technical knowledge about it. So, you can make your blog as paid or free or you can also mix it up. But if you are posting premium content 10% of the money made is collected by Substack.
Ghost
Ghost is free, open-source software that only focuses on blogging or publishing.
This has a built-in feature to help you create a membership community for your blog and you can also charge them for access. So it is more like a combination of WordPress and Substack. But you host the software on your own hosting so you have more control here.
Wix
Wix is like WordPress more of a website builder than a blogging website but yeah it’s free of cost. It includes blogging functionality so you’ll get the added benefit of access to website building tools.
The free plan from Wix has limitations like Wix subdomains and mandatory Wix ads on every page but its features are sufficient for basic blogs.
Wix charges $4.50 per month for the custom domain name and $8.50 per month for a combo plan with the same for an ad-free si.
Weebly
Weebly is more like Wix, a full-time website builder with blogging functionality. The only difference is the templates and interface. For a custom domain name, you’ll have to pay $5 per month and $12 per month for the connect plan to go ad-free.
Jekyll
If you’re a developer looking for a free blogging platform then Jekyll is what you want. To turn text or media content into your blog it gives a database freeway. To create a blog you can create a few command lines and to host it you can use GitHub pages for free.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform. So if you’re someone who does the short form of blogs you can very much try Tumblr. It has a built-in social community so there are chances of people coming across your content. The best part is a free blogging platform.
Blogger
Blogger is a platform offered by Google for free. You are given a subdomain but you can pay for your own domain name. It does lack some of the features other platforms offer so it might seem a bit old school but it’s great for basic blogging.
This was a list of blogging platforms in 2022 that you can go for. Also if you want best blogging wordpress themes you can use our best themes to start your blogging carrer.