The First Rule of Successful Blogging: Don't Take Canned Advice

Am I a successful blogger? No. Not by the accepted standard. I don't make money (directly, anyway) by blogging, and I would fail miserably if I tried, because I don't have the traffic to back up that sort of business plan. Am I still qualified to give good advice on this subject? You betcha!

You know why? Because I know when I'm reading an article designed specifically to drive traffic. There are plenty of those in the "How to Blog" genre. They're easy to spot because they either:

1. Tell you absolutely nothing of any value. ("How do you make money blogging? By driving traffic!")

   OR

2. Give you advice with no real thought behind it. ("You must use this platform! Why? Because everyone else is using it!")

Sometimes, both.

There's not much I can say about driving traffic ('though I will mention that Outbrain works wonderfully, at least in terms of increasing pageviews). But what I can tell you is that anyone who says that you must use one specific platform in order to succeed as a blogger is flat-out wrong. Choosing a blogging platform is like choosing a place to work. Some places/platforms will be a better fit for some workers/bloggers than others. Saying that every blogger should use a particular platform is like saying that every worker should work at a specific company.  In that context, it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

Most how-to-blog bloggers will tell you that you need to use self-hosted WordPress in order to be successful. There's no shortage of bloggers who use and love that platform. A self-hosted WordPress installation offers a lot of flexibility in terms of both appearance and function. And that's great. But every time I've used self-hosted WordPress, I've spent more time fiddling with WordPress, itself, than actually creating content. For me, it was not a good fit. I'm my most productive using TypePad, so that's the right fit, for me.

That doesn't mean that TypePad is the right fit for you, and I'd have to give up a big ol' chunk of integrity in order to tell you that it is.

So, how do you determine the right platform for your own blogging endeavor?

Trial and error is a good place to start. Luckily, some of the more popular hosted platforms make the trial-and-error approach easy. You can blog for free at TypePad, Blogger or WordPress.com. Squarespace offers a free trail, as TypePad does for it's more advanced accounts. (TypePad really is a get-what-you-pay for kinda deal.) A "free trial" of WordPress.org is a bit more complicated. The software, itself, is free (as in open source), but it order to try it for free, you'll either have to find free hosting--good luck with that--or install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your computer, then run it locally. (That last bit is a tad more complicated than I intend for for this blog post to be. If you're running Windows, and want to know more, Google "WAMP" or "XAMPP".)

A couple of other things to consider are how much you're willing to invest in blogging, in terms of

1. money,
2. time, and
3. technical expertise.

As flexible as self-hosted WordPress is, it's going to cost you in all three of those areas. Quality hosting is generally going to cost you something. You're going to be responsible for keeping both WordPress, itself, and whatever plugins you use, updated. You'll be responsible for your own security, and when something breaks, it's your baby. If you're reading this, and have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll posit that starting off with a hosted platform (Blogger, TypePad, Squarespace, WordPress.com, etc.) might be a really good idea.

If you insist on making absolutely no financial investment in your blogging, then both Squarespace and self-hosted Wordpress will be non-starters. If you want to blog for commercial purposes, or stick every widget you come across in your blog's sidebar, WordPress.com won't be a good fit for you.

This wasn't meant to be a long ramble, just a response to a post I read that ticked me off a bit. So, in closing, I'll leave you with this last bit of advice:

1. There are far too many platforms available for anyone--myself included--to cover in one reasonably-sized blog post, and they all have both positives and negatives. Do some looking around. Determine for yourself what may or may not fit your needs.
2. In some cases, what is a positive or a negative will depend upon the individual blogger.
3. Most importantly: The people who tell you what platform to use won't be the people creating your content. (Unless you're a damned scraper, in which case, frell off). You should use what works for you.