Back before Internet became a thing, people used to keep journals and diaries to write down their personal thoughts, anecdotes, and experiences. You probably kept one too, and maybe you still do.
But now the world has gone completely digital and even if you pride yourself on being a traditional person, you still want to keep up with the changing times, just like everyone else.
That’s probably why you are here, looking to start your own blog. Because they are so ‘in’ right now!
In fact, today, a whopping 570 million blogs (and counting) are on the web and more than 77% of people regularly read blogs online! How amazing, right?!
What’s more? It turns out, marketers who use blogs receive 67% more leads than those who do not! It’s no wonder that most businesses now have a blog of their own.
But the funny problem is, if you are considering starting a blog of your own, there are just too many choices! And that makes it harder to pick one. But, we’re here to help.
Whether you want to start a blog to widen the horizons of your business ventures or to simply share your recipes and traveling experiences, you have come to the right spot place!
Here, we will give you a list of some amazing blog sites that you can use to embark on your blogging adventure. Before that, let’s try to understand what exactly a blog site is!
What Exactly is a Blog Site?
A blog site is an online informational platform where a writer or group of writers share their views or provide information on any topic of their choice. Basically, it’s a web page or website that allows you to publish your own written content.
Blogs are known for their informal or conversational style of writing in conveying information. Kind of like this blog you are reading right now! The topics written can vary from person to person and business to business. It can even include pictures, videos, gifs, and other forms of media.
Now you must be wondering: how is this any different from a regular website?
Well, a blog site is regularly updated, which could be on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. You’ve to keep putting up new content or a collection of new posts for the visitors to read.
And not just that, blogs encourage engagement, unlike regular websites. This means that anyone who visits your blog can interact or engage with the writer by commenting or asking questions within the blog post itself!
Now that you have a clearer idea of what blog sites are, we’ve prepared a list of blog sites that you can use to kick start your blogging journey! So what are you waiting for? Dive right in!
List of 11 Great Blog Sites You Need to Check Out
1. Wix
Let’s start our list with Wix, an amazing blogging website for small businesses. It has a simple intuitive design that makes it easy for you to create a new blog within a few minutes! In fact, it even walks you through the entire process step-by-step if you need it. Also, its drag and drop editor and integrations with third-party apps helps you easily customize your blog.
With Wix, you can add multiple elements to your pages, from multimedia widgets to backgrounds, menus, typography, forms, video boxes etc. It offers over hundreds of templates from which you can choose your favorite one. Wix has an automatic email subscription feature that helps you collect leads right on your website itself! What’s more? It also has in-built SEO!
Key features
- Offers an automatic email subscription feature
- Has an in-built SEO for ranking
- Supports third-party integrations
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Paid plans start at $8.50/month
Read more: Best Website Widgets That Can Drastically Improve Your Website!
2. WordPress
Next on the list is WordPress, one of the most popular free blogging sites that you can find. It’s so popular that it has a large community of experts who provide tutorials for new bloggers. It’s super simple to use and enables you to start the blog in just a matter of few minutes!
WordPress comes with pre-designed free themes and templates that allow you to choose your preferred look and feel of your blog site. It has a powerful dashboard for maintenance, publishing, and getting an overview of what’s happening to your blog. It supports over 55,000 plugins to enhance your blogging experience along with providing SEO tools to help you rank in search engines.
You can later host your WordPress with payment so that you can get additional features such as 50GB disk space, better bandwidth, 100MB worth of email storage, and free SSL as well.
Key features
- Highly reliable and secure blogging site
- Comes with multiple free pre-designed themes and templates
- Supports SEO tools and over 55,000 plugins
Plans and pricing
- WordPress.org is a free tool.
- WordPress.com has free plans and paid plans that start at $4/month billed yearly
Read more: How to Automate Content (And Why You Should)
3. SquareSpace
If you run an e-commerce site and looking to make money through blogging, then Squarespace is an amazing option for you. It is an all-in-one site builder that helps set up web stores and blogs at the same time, allowing your visitors to buy your products without ever leaving your blog post!
With Squarespace’s drag and drop tools, you can easily create stunning sites. You can also use their professionally designed templates which include grid layouts and 3D scrolling to give your blog a unique look and feel.
Squarespace supports Twitter stream, RSS feed, search bar, and more. What’s more? Squarespace also offers powerful SEO tools to help your content get a higher ranking on the search engine.
Key Features
- Allows blogging with extension to e-commerce sites
- Supports live-updating and RSS feed
- Offers SEO tools
Pricing:
- Personal website plan starts at $12/month
- Business plan starts at $18/month
4. Medium
Looking for a free and easy-to-use blog to establish your passion for writing? Then, we think Medium is the perfect blog site for you. You don’t have to worry about coding, design, domain, or any other issues while starting out with Medium, because you can pretty much just sign up and start writing!
The great advantage of using Medium is that your articles will be exposed to a wide audience as it is a platform with over 60 million readers! And since it comes with a set of social networking functions, it allows your readers to comment and like your blog content so that you can see their feedback and suggestions.
You can monetize your blogs with Medium Partner Program, which lets you earn money when someone reads your content. Medium also is accessible across all devices.
Key features
- Supports social media integrations
- Medium Partner Program allows monetization
- Provides exposure to a vast audience
Pricing:
- Medium is free to use.
5. Ghost
If what you need is a very simple and minimalistic blogging platform, then we recommend you check out Ghost. It is a pretty straightforward blog site with a clean, intuitive user interface that contains zero limits on customizations and social media restrictions. It’s 100% about blogging and because it is self-hosted, it gives you more control over your site than many other blogging platforms.
With Ghost’s premium plans, you can target readers through newsletters and also monetize your written content. The user-administration features of Ghost is great for teams as it helps assign roles and permissions. Its automatic content backup system prevents loss of data.
It has built-in advanced SEO options and a sleek web app dashboard that is powered by JavaScript. Moreover, Ghost provides integrated AMP support, which can help your blog load faster on mobile devices and rank higher in search results.
Key Features
- Supports a minimalistic user interface
- Prevents data loss through automatic backups
- Has built-in advanced SEO tools and integrations
Pricing:
- Custom domain starts around $15/year
- Web hosting costs roughly $8/month
6. Weebly
Here is Weebly, another website builder that comes with an e-commerce integration which allows you to set up a blog as well as sell your products. It has an easy-to-use drag and drop editor which you can use to build your webpage and customize it by adding photo galleries, slideshows, and other multimedia elements.
Weebly has limited third-party integrations which add functionality to your blog and includes a social media sharing feature that supports RSS integration to share your content on social networks. Its SEO tools help rank your website on the search engine while its built-in hosting provider ensures a fast loading time for your website.
What’s more? All Weebly plans come with a free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate!
Key Features:
- Supports e-commerce integration
- Allows social media sharing
- Provides SEO tools for ranking
Pricing:
- A limited free plan is available.
- Custom domain will cost you $4/month
7. Blogger
Blogger is a blogging service offered by Google and it is one of the oldest free blog sites you can find! All you need to set up a blog site is it to log in using your Google account and follow a few simple guidelines. It requires no technical knowledge as it has a super simple user interface that is similar to a Google+ profile and an editor that looks similar to a Word page.
Blogger offers multiple themes, advanced color filtering, and various minimalist widgets, and it is highly reliable and secure. It comes with ad spaces that you can place within your content and monetize by integrating it with Google AdSense. Its analytics feature helps assess your blog’s traffic and see which content is getting the most visits.
Key Features:
- Integrates with Google AdSense for monetization
- Offers secure storage with Google
- Provides analytics to asses blog traffic
Pricing:
- Blogger is free with a Blogspot subdomain.
8. Tumblr
What if you could combine social media and visual content with a blogging platform? Then here we have Tumblr, a free micro-blogging platform with a playful interface that makes it easy to sign up and start blogging.
Just like a regular blog site, Tumblr provides multiple post formats, themes, and design options, but what makes it great is that it allows you to integrate your post with photos, videos, audio files, GIFs, stickers, and many other media files.
Despite not being popular for business purposes, Tumblr lets you display ads, use affiliate links, and integrates your blog with Google Analytics. Because it has a huge community and social network features, it helps your content have a wider reach.
Key features
- Integrates with social networks
- Allows re-blogging and sharing
- Provides password protection
Pricing:
- Tumblr is free
9. TypePad
Next on the list is TypePad, a reliable blog hosting service that can be used by both large and small organizations. It offers various design tools and provides over 200 plus themes which help make your blogs visually appealing.
TypePad has a simple interface and supports a dashboard which makes it easy to compose new posts and pages. A unique feature of TypePad is that it comes with a built-in photo album, which lets you to use images directly from the website.
With this site, you can share your blog on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. You can also monetize your TypePad blog by using Google AdSense. What’s more? It also offers SEO tools to help your ranking on Google.
Key Features:
- Provides over 200 stunning templates
- Supports a built-in photo album
- Integrates with social media and SEO tools
Pricing:
- Basic plan starts at $4.95/month
10. Joomla
Joomla is a powerful content management system that can be used to build any kind of website or blog. It has a flexible interface that is super easy to set up and use. It provides hundreds of templates and multiple extensions to help you add more features to the blog and also lets you fully customize it.
Joomla provides an old-school editor that looks like Microsoft word and allows you to pick your favorite font, color, size, emoticons, tables, or background. It is a multilingual website which means that you can make and publish your blog in various languages.
Key Features
- Easy to set up a blog and website
- Offer multiple templates and extensions
- Supports various languages
Pricing
- Joomla is free to download
11. LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn has developed an internal blog site within the social network itself called LinkedIn Pulse, for the sole purpose of blogging and sharing articles. It has a WordPress-style article editor which allows you to write articles and publish them on LinkedIn itself as it’s the perfect place to build a business blog.
It’s so simple to set it up that all you have to is to go to your feed and click ‘write an article’. Pulse allows you to track the demographics of your readers such as how many times your content has been viewed and shared, to gain audience insights. It notifies your connections each time you publish a post and comes with built-in SEO tools that help increase your search engine visibility.
Key Features
- Tracks demographics of your audience
- Notifies readers about published posts
- Contains built-in SEO tools
Pricing
- LinkedIn Pulse is absolutely free
Before You Go, Check Out Elink.io: A Webpage Creator For All Types of Websites
When you want to start your own blog or grow your business online, you need a website that is visually appealing and functions great.
But are we all tech-savvy enough to build a web page with just a few clicks? With elink, you are! It is the fastest & easiest way to create beautiful content for your website.
Just pick a template, add links to things that you want to share and elink will help you create a stunning web page in a matter of few minutes! elink offers you over 70 stunning templates so that you never have to worry about design and can just focus on your content.
Elink allows you to customize the look and feel of the web page you are creating by changing change fonts, background colors, text colors, and more with minimal effort! You can also update the SEO setting of your content and edit descriptions and keywords to make your content more search engine-friendly.
You can also download elink’s browser extensions and publish content on your website on the go! What’s more? Elink has a robust automation tool that automates content creation for your web pages. All you have to do is choose sources and then publish your content anywhere!
It’s the perfect tool for creating a curated webpage. So, what are you waiting for? Get elink and get your website going!
Conclusion
… and that’s a wrap to this blog!
We have given you a list that ranges from basic blogging sites to blogs jam-packed with all kinds of features, suitable for both personal and professional blogging.
It couldn’t get more diverse than this! It’s everything you could ask for as a newbie in the world of blogging.
Now, we only hope that you have come to a decision about which blog site to choose and you’re ready to kick-start your writing journey. Wait no longer to be a blogger, because the blogging world awaits you!
Further reads:
11 Social Media Automation Tools Every Marketer Needs
14 Best Websites for Downloading Free Illustrations
11 WordPress Widgets to Make Your Website Even Better!
Build Brand Awareness With These 9 Quick Yet Effective Ways
Best Content Creation Tools for Small Businesses
