The 5 Best Free Blogging Platforms in 2019 (100% Unbiased)

So, you’d like to take blogging for a test drive, eh?

See if you like it or not before ponying up the bucks for a complete self-hosted WordPress setup?

You’ve probably heard you can start a blog for free, and indeed you can. The big question is:

What’s the best free blogging platform right now?

And the answer is… it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

In this post, we’ll go over all the different free blogging platforms and give you the pros and cons of each, but first, let’s stop to ponder a more fundamental question:

Table of Contents

• Do You Even Need a Free Blogging Platform?
• No Blogging Platform is Right for Everyone
• #1. Medium: Best Platform for Simplicity
• #2. WordPress.com: Best Sandbox Platform
• #3. LinkedIn: Best Platform for Professionals
• #4. Instagram: Best Platform for Visuals
• #5. Guest Blogging: Best Platform for Building Your Authority
• Making the Switch to Self-Hosted WordPress
• What’s the Best Free Blogging Platform for You?

Do You Even Need a Free Blogging Platform?

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The truth:

Blogging can be expensive.

If you’re a seasoned blogger who’s been around the block a time or two, who’s already figured out which ideas work and which don’t, it’s easy to chalk up these costs as the price of doing business. Spend money, make money. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

But what if you’re a beginner learning how to start a blog for the first time? What if you’re someone who hasn’t yet figured what works and what doesn’t?

I’ll let you in on a secret…

You can experiment just as well on a free blogging platform as you can on a self-hosted WordPress setup with all the bells and whistles.

Actually, you can experiment better on a free blogging platform since the learning curve isn’t as steep.

Do you really want to experience the inevitable growing pains of blogging while forking over large piles of cash each month?

Free blogging platforms allow you to confirm your blog topic has potential, spy on the competitors in your niche, and test your ideas without spending any of your hard-earned dough.

So which one is best?

Well, that’s the thing:

No Blogging Platform Is Right for Everyone

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Different bloggers have different needs, and different blogging platforms are good for different things. Ultimately, “best” will depend on you and your situation.

That said, each of the platforms we’ll discuss do have common traits (besides being free). Let’s briefly look at them before we dive in:

• There’s zero maintenance hassle. The burden of maintenance doesn’t fall on you when you use a free blogging platform. No worries about software updates, data backups, or gremlins hacking your server — they’re all handled by someone else.
• They’re easy to use. To varying degrees, each platform is friendly to beginners. With limited tech savviness, you could get started today.
• Customization is limited. If you’re a micromanager, take a deep breath: you will not have full control or unlimited options when you use a free blogging platform.

That last one can be both a blessing and a curse.

Once you get serious about blogging, the limited customization options of free platforms will likely hold you back. When you’re just starting though, the limitations will help you focus on what’s important: the aforementioned testing of your ideas.

Alright, enough prologue.

Ready to find out which platform is best for you? Let’s go.

#1. Medium: Best Platform for Simplicity

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First up is Medium.

Founded by Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, Medium launched in August 2012 to much fanfare, and it’s grown into a behemoth. According to the New York Times, as of May 2017, Medium was up to 60 million unique visitors each month.

That’s considerably less than WordPress, but Google Trends indicates the tide could be turning:

The red line in the graphic above represents the number of worldwide searches for “wordpress” during the past five years. The blue line represents the number of searches for “medium.”

Granted, some of those “Medium” searches could be for the TV show of the same name that starred Patricia Arquette from 2005 through 2011.

Nonetheless, it’s growth is impressive.

How Do You Get Started?

Medium offers multiple ways to register.

Don’t want to remember yet another password for yet another account? No problem. Sign up using one of your social media accounts.

Go to Medium.com and click the “Get Started” button:

Choose Google or Facebook. You’ll then be asked to log into your (Google or Facebook) account. Once you authorize Medium to access your account, it will redirect you back to Medium.

That’s it.

To get to your Medium account in the future, all you have to do is click “Sign In” on the homepage and choose the “Sign in with Google” or “Sign in with Facebook” option.

Or if you already have a Twitter account, it’s even easier. Choose the “Sign In” link instead of the “Get Started” button, and you’ll see the following:

Click the “Sign in with Twitter” button (even though you haven’t yet signed up).

If you haven’t already logged into Twitter, you’ll be asked to log in and then authorize Medium to access your Twitter account.

Click “Ok,” and you’ll be off to the races.

What Do You Get For $0?

A simple, beautiful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) blogging platform that embraces minimalism.

After you join, click your avatar (the floating head) in the top-right corner of the page and then, select “New story.”

You’ll land on a clean, easy-to-use editor.

Where to insert the title for your post is clearly defined. So, too, is where to begin typing your first sentence.

Every change you make gets automatically saved in the background. And as you type, you begin to see exactly how your finished post will appear to your readers.

That’s the beauty of a WYSIWYG editor.

There’s no guessing, no wondering, and no trial and error. If your post looks good in the editor, it’s going to look good when your post goes live after you click the “Ready to publish?” button.

And speaking of what happens after publishing, there’s something else Medium offers you for the whopping price of zero dollars and zero cents:

The chance to be featured in front of their 60+ million readers.

Write something that wows people and, if it receives enough love from readers (they click a “clap” button to show their approval), it could get featured as one of Medium’s top stories on their app and website…

Or in their “Daily Digest” email…

Such a spotlight would mean lots of new eyeballs on your content.

Who Should Use Medium?

Anyone. Everyone.

Seriously, though it isn’t perfect, you’ll be hard pressed to find a blogging topic or niche that Medium can’t service.

This is especially true if your niche will be self-improvement or entrepreneurship. Medium puts your content, your message, front and center to your readers.

As Evan Williams once put it: “Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.”

Best-selling authors. Entrepreneurs. Writers who stepped away for a season, but are making a comeback. Ministers who have a good sense of humor. Yours truly.

All have things to say, and all have found homes on Medium.

Who Should NOT Use Medium?

Microbloggers (you’d be better off using Instagram — more on that later).

Those who don’t plan on using their blog for writing (photographers, podcasters, etc.).

Anyone who likes to color outside the lines.

Medium is all about the written word. Sure, graphics embedded into Medium posts look great, but in the end, it all comes back to the words.

Medium is best for those who love words. It excels at typography. It uses an abundance of white space so that its text has a perfect canvas. It embraces a minimalistic design so that nothing distracts your readers from your precious — yes, I’m going to repeat it — words.

Look at this example screenshot from a post written by Jeff Goins:

Black text on a white background. A simple, easy-to-read font. It’s a perfect arrangement for Jeff’s strong, unique voice.

Medium offers no glitz, glam, or sparkles. And, unlike WordPress.com (which provides a few basic design themes and customization options), Medium is one size fits all.

What you see is what you get.

If you like what you see, great. If you don’t, there’s not a lot you can do about it.

Final Word on Medium

What are the Pros?

• Built-in audience of over 60 million readers!
• Good for all blog types
• Excellent typography — your blog will look professional
• More business friendly than WordPress.com

What are the Cons?

• Little, if any, customization — your blog will look like every other Medium blog

Conclusion: If the written word is your preferred medium, you’ll do very well with Medium. It’s an easy-to-use platform that puts your words front and center, and it’s the platform we most often recommend to beginner bloggers.

But is it the right choice for everyone?

Let’s look at the other options…

#2. WordPress.com: Best Sandbox Platform

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Source: Lorelle on WordPress

Launched in 2005, WordPress.com is a turnkey blogging platform built on the open-source WordPress.org software.

In any given month, over 409 million people will view more than 21 billion pages on WordPress.com’s network of blogs. In September 2018, more than 70 million posts were published and over 52 million blog comments were written.

In short, WordPress is quite popular.

How Do You Get Started?

Signing up for a free account takes only a few minutes.

Go to WordPress.com and click the “Get Started” button to get to Step 1:

You’ll need to enter your email address, a username, and a strong password.

Next, enter a few details about your blog for Step 2:

For Step 3, enter an address for your site:

Once you’ve typed something, you’ll get a list of options. Be sure to select the “Free” one.

Finally, in Step 4 you pick a plan. Again, choose the “Free” option.

What Do You Get For $0?

WordPress.com’s “free for life” plan gives you numerous features, including:

• A free WordPress.com subdomain
• “Jetpack” essential features
• Community support
• Dozens of free themes

Let’s look at those features in more detail:

Free Subdomain

A couple of definitions are probably in order…

First, what’s a domain? See the address bar at the top of your browser? What comes after the “https://” is the domain.

In the case of this site, the domain is smartblogger.com. For my site, it’s beabetterblogger.com.

And in the case of WordPress, the domain is wordpress.com.

So what’s a subdomain? If the domain is the parent, the subdomain is the child. Anything between the “https://” and the domain is a subdomain.

Some examples:

• alumni.harvard.edu
• braves.mlb.com
• finance.yahoo.com

That’s what WordPress is offering with its free subdomain.

So, if I wanted to start “Kevin’s Awesome Blog” on WordPress.com, my subdomain might be something like kevinsawesomeblog. Readers would type kevinsawesomeblog.wordpress.com in their browser to view my site.

It’s not a good look if you’re a business (more on that later), but for a sandbox blog where you’re testing your ideas, it’ll do the trick.

Jetpack Essential Features

WordPress.com doesn’t allow third-party plugins (unless you upgrade to their “business” plan). So, if your buddy tells you about this “amazing” WordPress plugin “you’ve got to try,” you’re out of luck until you upgrade to a self-hosted WordPress site.

However, WordPress.com’s free plan does come with many built-in plugins that offer everything from spam protection to contact forms.

For a complete list of the built-in functionality that WordPress.com offers, check out their plugins page.

Community Support

Possibly WordPress.com’s best feature (beyond the price) is its extensive support system and knowledgebase.

You can find virtually anything you need to know about using their free platform in WordPress.com’s Support section. To call their collection of how-to articles merely “extensive” would be an understatement.

And if you have a specific question you need an answer for, they have you covered there too.

Visit the WordPress.com forum, search to see if anyone has had your same question, and browse the answers. Can’t find the solution you need? Post the question yourself.

Free Themes

Whereas Medium prevents you from customizing the look of your blog, WordPress.com gives you options.

With “dozens” (93 at the time of this writing) of free themes from which to choose, WordPress.com offers design flexibility that isn’t available with Medium and the other free platforms.

What we’re saying is…

You get a lot for “free.”

Who Should Use WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a solid platform for almost every type of blogger.

Do you want to be a self-help blogger? Good news — WordPress.com will meet your needs.

Want to blog on food, pets, or politics? You’re in luck.

Just want to write about life? That’s WordPress.com’s jam, my friend.

Source: The Next Adventure

But WordPress.com is good for more than just blogging. You can also use it for projects and e-commerce stores, which isn’t something the other free platforms can claim.

That gives it an edge over the other options. If you want to blog and do something else with your site, WordPress.com offers flexibility the others do not.

However, it’s not a good fit for everyone…

Who Should NOT Use WordPress.com?

If you want to blog for a business, you should skip WordPress.com and look into Medium or LinkedIn (which we’ll discuss in a moment).

Why?

Because it makes you look like a cheapskate.

Free is wonderful, but using WordPress.com when you’re a business is the equivalent of handing out business cards with the printer’s logo on the back of them.

Doesn’t exactly scream “I’m a professional,” does it?

Also:

If you’re hoping to join a blogging community where your posts have a chance to be discovered by new audiences, you should look elsewhere.

Medium shines a spotlight on the best their members have to offer. If you write something great, it has a chance to be featured and seen by millions.

WordPress.com? Not so much.

Here’s a screenshot of the most-recent “Editors’ Picks” on the official WordPress.com blog:

There might as well be tumbleweeds blowing across the screen.

Final Word on WordPress.com

What are the Pros?

• Suitable for a variety of blog types
• Solid support articles and forum
• More design options than other free platforms
• Shorter learning curve if you choose to transition to self-hosted WordPress later
• Good for more than just blogs

What are the Cons?

• Not ideal for businesses
• You can’t install third-party themes and plugins
• Lack of community makes it difficult to build an audience from scratch
• WordPress advertising and banners may appear next to your content

Conclusion: If you’re a non-business blogger who wants an easy to use platform that gives you some control over customization, WordPress.com is a solid option — especially if you plan to transition to self-hosted WordPress someday.

#3. LinkedIn: Best Platform for Professionals

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Source: Darren Rowse

Next up is LinkedIn.

Primarily used for professional networking, LinkedIn also offers a publishing platform. This allows any of its 560 million users (as of September 2018) to write posts that could (potentially) be read by any of the 260 million members who are active in a given month.

(Again, potentially.)

How Do You Get Started?

Go to LinkedIn.com, and you’ll see this window encouraging you to join:

Enter your name, your email, and a strong password. Then click the “Join now” button.

You’ll then be asked to answer a few simple questions:

• Your country and zip code
• Whether or not you’re a student (if no, you’ll enter your job title and the name of your employer; if yes, you’ll enter the name of your school and other relevant info)
• Your reason for joining LinkedIn

It sounds like a lot, but it’s fairly harmless.

Still, if you feel the urge to throw your computer into the dumpster, we won’t blame you.

What Do You Get For $0?

A free-to-use publishing platform that’s focused on professionals and business contacts.

If you’re already a LinkedIn member, publishing your content will be easier than WordPress.com, Medium, or any other blogging platform.

Why?

Because it’s built right into your LinkedIn profile. Click the “Write an article” button and start writing.

Who Should Use LinkedIn?

Anyone who wants to reach professionals and businesses.

After all, that’s what LinkedIn is all about, right? Nurturing business relationships.

Source: Syed Balkhi

Blogging on LinkedIn helps to cultivate those relationships.

When you write an article, LinkedIn will notify your existing connections. If your article is great (and why wouldn’t it be?), they’ll take notice. Write more and more great articles, and they’ll start to see you as an authority.

And, like with Medium, great content on LinkedIn has a chance to get noticed by those outside your list of connections.

If one of LinkedIn’s editors sees your masterpiece and decides to feature it on one of LinkedIn’s numerous channels, your work gets exposed to a giant audience of interested, like-minded professionals.

Tip: Want to increase the chances a LinkedIn editor will see your article? Share it on Twitter and include “tip @LinkedInEditors” in your tweet.

Who Should NOT Use LinkedIn?

This one is pretty straightforward…

If you aren’t a working professional, or you’re not looking to reach working professionals, you’ll be better off choosing one of the other free platforms.

Final Word on LinkedIn

What are the Pros?

• Good for professionals and businesses
• Clean, simple design
• Easy to use — publishing platform is built right into your LinkedIn profile
• Built-in audience of like-minded professionals

What are the Cons?

• Only good for professionals and businesses
• Very few customization options
• You can’t schedule posts for future publishing

Conclusion: If you’re looking to write posts that will reach professionals and businesses, LinkedIn is the best free blogging platform available.

#4. Instagram: Best Platform for Visuals

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A photo and video-sharing platform that’s owned by Facebook, Instagram is one of the largest social media sites in the world.

As of June 2018, Instagram has 1 billion users worldwide. The previous September, they had 800 million users — a growth of 200 million in only nine months.

Even if you subtract everyone who follows a Kardashian or has posted a photo of themselves impersonating a duck, Instagram offers an audience of well over 75 people.

(Kidding. Mostly.)

How Do You Get Started?

On a personal computer, go to Instagram.com, and you’ll see the following:

Enter your phone number or email address, your name, your desired username, and a strong password. Then click the “Sign up” button.

Or, skip all that and click the “Log in with Facebook” button (assuming you have a Facebook account). If you aren’t already logged in, it will ask you to log into your Facebook account.

You could also do the above using the Instagram app on your mobile device.

What Do You Get For $0?

You get an extremely popular social media platform that’s perfect for microblogging.

What’s microblogging, you ask? Here’s how it works:

You get a great image. Maybe it’s a photo you took on your camera, or perhaps it’s a Creative Commons image that perfectly fits your current shade of melancholy.

You upload the image to Instagram.

And for the caption? You write a short blog post.

Here are a couple examples:

In the above screenshot, Sarah Von Bargen cleverly plugs a course she offers in the midst of a tiny, bite-sized post (accompanied by a photo of assorted beverages).

And in the below screenshot, my friend Jaime Buckley (in true Jaime Buckley style), uses Instagram to publish an eye-catching graphic alongside 107 inspirational words on parenting.

That’s microblogging — and it can be done very, very well using Instagram.

Who Should Use Instagram?

Anyone who focuses on highly-visual topics.

Models…

Photographers…

Yoga instructors…

Professional chefs…

Make-up artists, hair stylists, clothing stores…

The list goes on and on.

If you’re someone who can combine great visuals with short posts that pack a punch, you can have great success using Instagram as a microblogging platform.

Who Should NOT Use Instagram?

If your idea of a great image involves pulling out the iPhone 3G you’ve had since 2008 and snapping a photo, Instagram may not be the platform for you.

If you tend to draft novels when you write, Instagram’s 2,200 character limit when writing captions could prove problematic.

Also, if your target audience tends to shy away from mobile devices for any reason, Instagram might not be the best platform to test your ideas. Instagram started life as a mobile app. Mobile is where it shines, and it’s where most of its users call home.

(So, if you’re planning to start a Wilford Brimley fan club, it’s probably best to skip Instagram.)

Final Word on Instagram

What are the Pros?

• Great for visual topics
• Ideal platform for microblogging (short posts)
• Great if your target audience primarily uses mobile devices

What are the Cons?

• Limited to 2,200 characters
• Limited to one hyperlink (in your bio)
• If your target audience isn’t on mobile, it’s less than ideal

Conclusion: Instagram offers a great microblogging platform geared toward visual topics. However, it is not kind to fans of the great Wilford Brimley.

#5. Guest Blogging: Best Platform for Building Your Authority

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Sometimes, the best platform for your work is someone else’s popular blog.

Why? Because it can mean instant credibility.

Once your post publishes on a site like Smart Blogger, Forbes, Lifehacker, or Business Insider; people look at you differently.

Yesterday, you were just you — a talented, attractive writer living in obscurity. But then, after having your work published on a well-known website, you’re now seen as a subject matter expert in your field.

What happened? Guest blogging happened.

How Do You Get Started?

There are two approaches to finding sites where you can contribute guest posts.

The first is easy…

Check to see if the blogs you already like to read (that are relevant to your niche, of course) accept guest post submissions.

Browse their “About” or “Start” pages. Try their “Contact” page. Sometimes, they’ll make it easy and have a “Contribute” or “Write for Us” link in their navigation menu or footer.

The second approach involves utilizing Google’s and Twitter’s search capability.

Here’s how it works:

As you can in the screenshot above, you can query a topic (in this example: “blogging”) along with a search phrase (“write for us”).

Google returned a list of results that contained both of those search terms/phrases.

Click on the results that look promising, browse the sites, and see if they’re a good fit. Not all sites will be worth your time. Skip the ones that aren’t. Bookmark the matches.

Then try some other, similar queries:

• “Blogging” + “guest post”
• “Blogging” + “contribute”
• “Blog tips” + “write for us”

And so on.

Replace “blogging” and “blogging tips” with whatever topics you would like to write about.

Searching for guest blogging opportunities on Twitter follows a similar routine:

Type “guest post”, “guest blog post”, “guest article”, etc. in the search box. Twitter will give you a list of tweets where people used those exact phrases.

Every time someone proudly tweets that a guest post they’ve written has been published on someone’s site, as Meera Kothand does in the above screenshot, it’s saved by Twitter for posterity. And it allows you to go on an archeological hunt find it.

Scroll through the results.

Based on the title of the guest post and the site that published it, you will have a good idea whether or not it’s a match for you. Keep scrolling until you find some possibilities. Click the link in the tweet, browse the site, and bookmark it for later if you think it’s a contender.

What Do You Get For $0?

You get the chance to put your words in front of already-existing, relevant audiences.

Jon wasn’t an unknown when he wrote How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World as a guest post for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger in 2011, but he was an unknown to me until I discovered the post a few years later.

Then everything changed.

It didn’t matter that Jon was already well known by most thanks to his former role at Copyblogger; for me, his ProBlogger post was a gateway drug.

Jon went from being an unknown — a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce — to an authority on blogging I had to read.

That’s the power of guest blogging. Every time you put your words in front of newly targeted audiences; you have the chance to gain fans for life.

Who Should Guest Blog?

Anyone who wants to build their credibility and boost their authority.

How can guest blogging do that, you ask? Let’s use me as an example.

Before I wrote my first guest post for Smart Blogger, the only people who viewed me as an authority on blogging were my wife and maybe one of our cats.

My site, Be A Better Blogger, was less than a year old. After reading a post about quitting your job and moving to paradise written by some guy named Jon, launching my own “blog about blogging” sounded like a great idea.

So that’s what I did. I was on unemployment at the time, and I had a lot of free time on my hands.

And I was doing a great job in such a short period.

The only problem?

I had little credibility. Few saw me as an authority on the topics I was writing.

Then I received an email…

Jon’s editor, the talented Glen Long, invited me to write a guest post for Smart Blogger (formerly known as Boost Blog Traffic).

That guest post…

Led to a second opportunity…

Which led to a third…

Which led to the post you’re reading right now.

It led to opportunities like writing for Syed Balkhi over at OptinMonster.

It led to being asked to provide quotes for dozens of blog posts and articles.

It led to flattering, tongue-placed-firmly-in-cheek emails like this one from James Chartrand:

It may not have led to tons of traffic for my website or large crowds chanting my name in the streets, but guest blogging did something that would have taken me considerable time to do on my own:

It legitimized me.

Hey, and speaking of website traffic…

Who Should NOT Guest Blog?

Anyone who wants to build up their own blog.

The reason? It isn’t very efficient.

Brace yourself…

You would better off publishing your masterpiece on your website, even if it isn’t yet popular, rather than on someone else’s — even if their website is very popular.

Please don’t misunderstand: Guest blogging is a great way to gain credibility; however, it isn’t a great way to get traffic to your blog. Not anymore.

Guest blogging may have been a nice traffic source in the past, but those days are long gone.

In his eye-opening article on the topic, Tim Soulo determined guest blogging was a poor return on investment if your goal was to generate traffic to your website.

According to Tim’s survey of over 500 bloggers (which included yours truly):

• Guest posts from those in the marketing niche earned their authors an average of only 56 website clicks
• 85% of the authors received fewer than 100 referrals to their sites

That doesn’t mean you should never guest blog. It just means you need to be clear about your reasons for doing so.

Guest blog for credibility, for boosting your authority, and for building your brand.

Don’t guest blog if you’re hoping for traffic. More often than not, you’ll be disappointed.

Oh, and there’s one more group who shouldn’t guest blog:

Those who want to take shortcuts.

There’s both good and bad when you’re putting your words in front of a large audience. If your post teaches them something new, inspires them, or gives them something juicy to chew on; they’ll remember you for it.

And if it sucks? Yeah, they’ll remember you for that too.

Guest blogging is a great way to build your authority, but it’s also a great way to destroy it.

If you’re not willing to put in the time and do the work, guest blogging isn’t for you.

Final Word on Guest Blogging

What are the Pros?

• Write for interested, targeted audiences
• Fastest way to build your authority and reputation

What are the Cons?

• Fastest way to destroy your authority and reputation
• Not an efficient method for getting traffic to your own website
• Getting published on quality sites is hard work
• Time-consuming — may be hard to fit into busy schedules

Conclusion: Guest blogging is a great way to build your authority and get your content in front of new readers. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. However, it’s unlikely to generate tangible traffic to your blog.

Making the Switch to Self-Hosted WordPress

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Technically, there’s one more free option out there…

The WordPress.org software — the same software used by WordPress.com — is free too. It’s free for any and all to use.

However, just like there’s no such thing as a free puppy (once you factor in food, veterinarian bills, and replacing all your shoes after they’ve become chew toys), WordPress.org’s software isn’t actually free once you add up the other expenses.

See, to use the software, you have to install it on your own web host. That costs money.

Is this something you will want to do eventually? Absolutely. Just not right now. Not when you’re getting started.

So how will you know when you’re ready?

Jon recommends making the switch once you reach a 20% outreach success rate.

What does that mean? Let’s break it down:

Step #1: Register for a Free Blog

Sign up for Medium, WordPress.com, or whatever free platform best fits your needs.

Step #2: Follow Jon’s New Method for Starting a Blog

If you haven’t read How to Start a Blog in 2018, do so immediately.

(Well, not immediately. Finish reading this post; leave us a comment; and share it with all your friends, loved ones, and acquaintances. Then, by all means, immediately after saying hi on Twitter, go and read Jon’s excellent tutorial.)

In the post, Jon shows you how to conduct a miniature outreach campaign where you email 10-20 influential bloggers and ask them to share your blog posts.

Once you’ve hit a 20% success rate, you’re ready to make the transition.

Step #3: Switch to Self-Hosted WordPress

Jon’s post also offers guidance for making the switch. When you’re ready to choose a web host, be sure to read WordPress Hosting: A Brutally Honest Guide That’ll Save You Money.

It’ll help you pick the best host for your needs and budget.

What’s the Best Free Blogging Platform for You?

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That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

You now know why testing your ideas on a free blogging platform when you’re just starting is a good idea. You now know the pros and cons of Medium, WordPress.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, and guest blogging. And, you now know how to get started with each of them.

So which one is it going to be?

If you want my honest opinion, the answer is simple…

The best free blogging platform is whichever one will get you to stop dipping your toes into the water and start diving in head first.

The next blogging masterpiece isn’t going to write itself.

Are you ready?

Then let’s do this thing.

About the Author: Kevin J. Duncan runs Be A Better Blogger, where he uses his very particular set of skills to help people become the best bloggers they can be.

The post The 5 Best Free Blogging Platforms in 2019 (100% Unbiased) appeared first on Smart Blogger.

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Why and How You Should Use Instagram's IGTV to Improve Your Social Media Video Strategy

Instagram's IGTV could be exactly what your marketing needs to take your social media video strategy to the next level. Here are 7 tips to help marketers use IGTV. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2018/40073/why-and-how-you-should-use-instagrams-igtv-to-improve-your-social-media-video-strategy

What to Blog About: The Data-Driven Guide to Choosing Blog Topics

Let’s begin with a simple fact:

Anyone can start a blog, but not anyone can start a blog other people want to read.

In the throes of self-pity, you might be tempted to believe it’s because of the fickleness of human nature, a lack of influential connections, or perhaps the realization of how difficult building an engaged audience actually is.

And you would be partially correct. All those factors do play a part.

But what if I told you the primary cause of failure for bloggers is actually their choice of what to blog about? Not their connections, not their persistence, not their understanding of how blogging actually works, but the accidental, unfortunate decision to write about the wrong blog topics.

You might be skeptical, and rightfully so. The good news is, I’m about to prove that assertion to you right now. Even better, I’ll show you how to uncover exactly what to blog about, increasing your chances of success 100X.

Blog Topic Insights from Studying 13,360 Bloggers

Over the years, my team and I have mentored 13,360 bloggers in every imaginable niche, language, and style. Everyone from meteoric success stories like Laurel Bern to thousands of students who have struggled to break through the noise.

And we’ve noticed some patterns. Some very interesting patterns.

Data from students shows us that some blog topics get traffic quite easily while others are nearly impossible. For instance, you can blog about square-shaped tomatoes with as much vigor and persistence as you like, and you’re never going to take off, because… nobody cares.

In fact, the range of blog topics where you can expect to both get substantial traffic and monetize is relatively narrow. Some blog topics that seem plausible from the outset, such as freelancing, actually don’t have a prayer of success.

In other words, your choice of what to blog about is critical. If you make the wrong decision, you can execute every traffic and monetization technique flawlessly, and none of it will work, because having the right blog topic is critical.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding your blog topic:

Step 1: Choose a Popular Niche

Before you write a single post, it’s worth asking yourself a simple question:

Is anyone in your niche getting significant traffic?

If not, what makes you think you can be the first?

For some reason, people are happy to invest hundreds or even thousands of hours into publishing content without stopping to consider if anyone else has ever been successful. Worse, they believe that competition is bad. They take pride in being the first person to write about a topic and believe that’s an opportunity.

It makes me want to cry. Not only is that perspective flat-out wrong, it’s tragic because it leads you to invest time into projects that never had a prayer of success.

So, how can you tell if a niche is popular or not?

The easiest way is to reference a research library like the one we have in Freedom Machine. It does all the heavy lifting for you by giving you a list of successful blogs, their most popular posts, and examples of how they monetize.

But let’s say you don’t have that. What can you do?

There’s no exact science to it, but here’s the process I recommend:

Find a List of Popular Blogs in the Niche

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This is trickier than it sounds.

Let’s say you’re blogging about how to trade stocks. Does that put you in the “stock trading” niche, the “investing” niche, or something else?

My advice: go to the broadest category that makes sense. In the case of trading stocks, that would actually be the “personal finance” niche, assuming you’re targeting people who want to trade stocks for themselves (more discussion about this later).

From there, just run a simple Google query like “best personal finance blogs”, and chances are, you’ll find several lists to browse through:

From there, you just need to dig a little deeper and find out how popular those blogs really are.

Plug the Blogs into Ahrefs to Uncover Their Traffic

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One of my favorite things about Ahrefs (affiliate link) is it gives you both social and search data. Let’s go through an example, and you’ll see what I mean.

In their Site Explorer, you can type in any URL to pull a report on the site:

You’ll get back a report with an enormous amount of data. Going back to our trading stocks example, let’s say I found out that Mr. Money Mustache is one of the most popular personal finance sites, so I plug it into Ahrefs. Here’s what comes back:

And that’s just a sample. In the left sidebar, there are lots of additional reports where you can go even deeper.

If you want to look at social traffic, for example, you can click the “Top Content” link, and here’s what you get back:

There’s all the content on the site, sorted by total shares. As you can see, the top 10 posts all crossed 2,000 shares, so it looks like Mr. Money Mustache is doing well from a social traffic perspective.

Personally, I like to see at least five sites within the same niche with at least five posts above 1,000 shares. That’s usually enough to start guessing what readers in the space want to read more about. More on this later.

A Word of Warning about Popularity

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Stop for a moment and think about another question:

What’s your end goal for building a blog?

I’m guessing it’s not just to get a bunch of traffic and feel good about yourself. You want to turn that traffic into money somehow, right?

Well, some niches are dramatically easier to monetize than others. You can get a lot of traffic writing about the daily activities of celebrities, for example, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make money blogging about it.

Some niches can only be monetized through advertising. A good example is the news. Every time you read an article on a news site, they get paid a few cents for an “impression.” That’s how they survive.

If you do the math though, it takes a lot of traffic to start earning enough from advertising to quit your job or do anything meaningful. Like… hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

For that reason, when my team evaluates popular niches, we also look at how the blogs are monetizing. Ideally, we want to see people selling some type of products and services because those genuinely have the highest ROI on blogs. If all we find are popular sites stuffed with ads, it’s a bad sign.

The bottom line?

Popularity is good, but it’s not enough. When you’re doing research, also pay attention to how blogs in the space are monetizing.

Step 2: Choose a Single Tribe That’s Hungry for Content

When you’re researching a niche, you’ll notice blogs seem to focus on different types of readers.

In the personal finance niche, for example, blogs like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar focus on fundamentals like secure investments, living frugally, and so on. At the same time, there are other blogs like I Will Teach You to Be Rich and Mr. Money Mustache that focus much more on how to increase your income and improve your lifestyle.

If you feel like those sites are fundamentally different, you’re right. While they both occupy the personal finance niche, they serve different “tribes.”

Here’s what I mean by tribe:

A tribe is a group of people who congregate online around common interests.

In the personal finance space, the two biggest groups are “save and invest” people and “increase your income” people. Neither tribe is right, but they don’t really mix well with one another. You won’t find a blog focusing equally on both tribes.

So, how does this help you?

It allows you to narrow in on your target audience. Here’s what to do:

Name the Tribe for Each Popular Blog in Your Niche

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Earlier, we talked about identifying at least five blogs with more than 1,000 shares on at least a few posts. Now let’s go back and figure out which tribe they are talking to.

For instance, here are the popular posts on Mr. Money Mustache:

Do you see the pattern?

Mr. Money Mustache is clearly positioning himself for getting rich and against extreme frugality in some of his most popular posts. In other words, he’s speaking primarily to the “increase your income” people.

So, go through your list of five blogs. Based on their most popular posts, who are they resonating with? If it’s not immediately clear, here’s how to figure it out:

1. Skim through their popular posts for patterns.
2. Read at least a few of them to get a better idea of their philosophy.
3. Based on what you’ve learned, assign the tribe a name.

When you’re finished, you should have a pretty good idea about who’s interested in reading what. From there, you’re ready to…

Choose the Tribe That’s the Best Fit for You

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Not all decisions can be made with spreadsheets and numbers. To succeed at blogging, you also need to consider what you enjoy talking about. The sweet spot is the overlap between your interests and everyone else’s:

For instance, let’s say all of the blogs you studied were suddenly interested in having you take over as Editor-In-Chief. Ask yourself…

1. Based on your own approach and philosophy, which tribe would be most excited to have you as their leader?
2. Which tribe do you feel like you could help grow and achieve their objectives?

In other words, you’re looking for an existing blog and tribe to serve as a model for what you want to build. It’s already built a following, so it’s clearly viable, and you feel like you could also contribute in a meaningful way.

That’s what I call the Zone of Magic. Ideally, it’s where you spend all your time.

What to Do It If You Don’t like Your Options

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Before we move on, there’s one important question we need to address:

What if you’re not a good match for any of the existing tribes in your niche?

Approximately 60% of the students who go through our flagship course, Freedom Machine, find themselves in this exact situation. They have zero interest in writing about any of the topics they find on other popular sites in their niche. Even worse, they feel like those bloggers and their tribes just “don’t get it.”

If you find yourself in that situation, here’s a little tough love for you:

If there’s not an existing tribe who’s clearly interested in the same things you are, and you start a blog anyway, you’re essentially telling people they are wrong and need to change the way they think. In general, people don’t respond well to this. Not only will they refuse to share your posts or buy your products, but they might send you some hate mail as well.

The better, safer, and ultimately much more rewarding approach?

Go back to the drawing board and find a tribe whose interests align with yours. Instead of fighting them, just figure out where they want to go and show them how to get there.

Here’s how…

Step 3: Write About Their Proven Interests

Which would you rather write about: topics you think your readers might like, or ones you know will get traffic, because you have proof of those topics being popular in the past?

Obviously, it’s better to have the proof, right? You might as well invest your time where you have the best chances of success.

In this section, I’ll show you how to uncover those proven interests, as well as put your own spin on them. Let’s jump in.

Drill Deeper into the Site Stats

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Earlier, we used Ahrefs (affiliate link) to examine the most shared posts on Mr. Money Mustache. Let’s go back to that:

In general, the highest-quality shares are the ones from Facebook, so I tend to sort posts that way instead of by overall shares. Save these for later by running a custom export of the first 20 rows and saving it to your computer.

The next step is to dig into the keywords driving the most search engine traffic. You can find those by clicking on “Organic keywords” in the left sidebar.

The default sorting by traffic is fine, but if you’re a beginning blogger, I would recommend eliminating all keywords with a keyword difficulty (KD) over 40. Again, do a custom export of the first 20 rows and save it to your computer.

You should go through the same process for all the most popular sites serving your tribe. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have a list of dozens or maybe hundreds of posts proven to be popular with your audience.

Choose Posts Where You Can Add Value

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So… now you have a big list of popular posts on other sites serving your tribe. That’s obviously useful information, but here’s the big question:

How do you use that information without sounding like a copycat?

You didn’t get into this to regurgitate the ideas of other writers. You want to publish content that’s uniquely you.

Here’s how:

Copy the topic, not the advice.

For instance, one of Mr. Money Mustache’s most popular posts is Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post. The topic is getting rich, and the advice is to live simply and frugally on half of what you make.

If I were to write a post on the same topic, I would talk about getting a remote job where you can live in a cheaper country like Mexico but continue making US dollars. In other words, I would give completely different advice on the same topic, and I would interweave my own story of moving to Mexico into it.

I’d also choose a different headline like, “How I Became a Millionaire from My Wheelchair.” Again, it’s the same topic, but an entirely unique headline. No one would accuse me of being a copycat.

You can follow the same approach with the most popular topics in your space. Scan through the list of posts you exported from Ahrefs (affiliate link) and choose the ones where you can write about the same topic but give your own unique advice.

Write a Better Version of That Post

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Okay, you’re almost ready to write your post. Finally!

Before you start scribbling down your thoughts, consider two final questions:

1. What made the post you studied on the topic popular?
2. What can you do to create an even better post?

It’s like the old saying, “Stand on the shoulders of giants.” When you find a popular posts model, you always want to know why it worked, and you want a good idea of how to improve upon it.

At some point, I’ll write a post detailing exactly how to do that, but here’s the short version. There are five ways to improve upon any post, and they all begin with the letter ‘D’:

• Detail: make your post more detailed (or comprehensive).
• Design: include an infographic or organize your points in a more useful way.
• Data: include unique stats or examples to back up your points.
• Drama: amp up the emotion by infusing your post with personality and stories.
• Distinctions: give advice based on your unique perspective as an expert.

For instance, the Getting Rich post on Mr. Money Mustache is pretty short and lacks a lot of detail, so if I wanted to compete, I would probably write a much more comprehensive manual for getting rich, clocking in at 3000+ words. I might also add in my personal story, giving it extra drama.

Regardless of which method you choose, here’s the bottom line:

Your goal is to write the best post ever published on a proven, familiar topic.

Is it easy?

Hell no. Usually, it’s a lot of work.

But this is how you win.

• You stop writing about whatever you want and limit yourself to proven topics.
• You study the competition.
• You create content so much better than theirs, that it makes them want to call their mommy.

‘nough said.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the CEO of Smart Blogger. Check out his new blog Unstoppable and read the launch post that went viral: 7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face.

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