The Ultimate Cheat Sheet of Free Blogging Platforms

      Best Free blogging Platform in 2017

Welcome to the blogging hub where today I will get you know which is the best blogging platform that allows you to make free blogs.

Although the best features are available in premium platforms but you can still build a nice blog in any of the free platforms.

I have included top 4 free blogging platform

• Blogger(Blogspot)
• Wordpress.com
• Weebly
• Wix

This is an unbiased review for them. 

There are some more blogging platforms like Tumblr, SquareSpace, Medium and other.

I am not including these blogging platforms because I feel they are more like social media platforms. And you can also say them, same as twitter which has more word limits. And some even don't provide free hosting.

The main factors that I have chosen for deciding best free blogging platform are-

• traffic generation capacity
• features available
• usability
• monetization options
• popularity 

 (Note- traffic generation capacity totally depends on you (SEO, content quality and your strategy ) but I focused on the  default feature to attract traffic )

  
 1) Traffic Generation Capacity

For a blogger like me, I think the more you get traffic the more you will be successful and it's obvious.

It is the ultimate goal that a blogger wants to achieve.(getting million page views or something like that)

So to know about traffic generation capabilities, what I did is I made a blog on all the blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress.com, Weebly, Wix) and made a post on all of them, then I left them for some time or maybe a bit longer ( I didn't do any  strategic SEO or spread it on social media.) 

All the possible ways that could get them traffic was their default ability. I was surprised after getting the result.

•  Wordpress Traffic analysis

•  Wix Traffic analysis

• Weebly Traffic analysis

  

•  Blogger Traffic analysis

It's just awesome to look at Blogger's performance. You may doubt the result. But I know why you should not.

Reason- It is simple, Blogger is owned by Google. The most trusted brand online and the Blogger's blog's are hosted on quality servers of
Google.

And Google crawlers may find it easy to crawl Blogger's blogs.

I don't think this traffic may be from search engines but thr fact is traffic is coming and it's great.

In this blog I've got traffic from India because it is my native country and from U.S which is good.

It is important here to note that though other blogging platforms give free SEO Plugins but I think that they are not so effective as they seem to be.




(I'm only commenting on FREE SEO plugins.)

But, this does not mean you can't get visitors from  Wordpress.com, Weebly and Wix. You just have to work harder make social media campaigns, generate quality backlinks and many more things to drive traffic.

 2) Features

Generally, Something with more features is always our favourite.
Think of smartphones, the one with more features is always our first choice. If you own a car would you not like to have some more cool features.

So we all need more features in everything in our life, how can we get behind in blogging?

How would you feel if you have professional themes, best SEO tools, email marketing, traffic analyser, link analyser, page rank checker, social media manager and much more for free?   

(I have included only that features which are special or different.)

Check out the features provided by them.

> Wordpress

• Professional themes
• Polls & surveys
• Email subscription
• 3 GB storage for pictures and videos
• Akismet (advanced anti-spam security)
• Form builder
• Photo CDN( Faster image loading and editing)
• MarkDown (Text formatting using a lightweight markup language)  
• Jetpack for SEO, stats and security.

 > Wix

• Traffic generator
• Professional themes
• Epic From builder
• Lumifish Popup
• Visitor analytics
• Before & After slider
• Flok customer loyalty
• Newsletter signup
• Chatbot &Livebot
• Inffuse testimonials 
• Social media stream 
• 500 MB storage and 500 MB Bandwidth

>Weebly

• Professional themes
• Justuno (Social incentive platform )
• Segmently(Campaigns to grow revenue)
• Better coupon Box
• 40 nuggets( convert traffics into leads)
• Reviews
• Marketgeo (Seo and web marketing tool)
• Traffic booster
• eClincher (social media marketing app)
• Call-out-Box(call attention to important content)
• 500 Mb storage

>Blogger

• 1 GB  of free image and video hosting (images that are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count against your free storage limit.)
• Some best professional themes has been introduced.
• unlimited hosting.
• complete freedom to edit your blog or do most of ideal things that you want.

Weebly has more free apps in comparison with Wix whereas Wordpress does not provide many free plugins( Wordpress call its features plugins, not an app ).

 

As Blogger is a non-profit organization it does not have many features, SEO tools and good themes, but you can download some free and paid themes on blogger. 

I think the free themes are very difficult for optimization and also are not SEO friendly.

But don't worry this year they have introduced some new good looking themes that are giving competition to others.

Although the quantity of themes are less but they are worth of appreciation.

So what I think is that there are many free features available in blogging platforms except Blogger but they are not so effective that you might feel after looking at them. 

As you know that Wordpress.com, Weebly, Wix are private companies seeking out for profits, so they don't give you really effective features that really works and are free.

You may say that Google is also an private company then why it is doing so much for free?

Well first thing is that Google earns from Blogger's blog by putting AdSense on quality blogs.
  

And doing self promotion from Blogger and it is also not one of the main business of Google.

So, there is not anything to not to trust on Blogger.

The next thing is that there are you can get many free tools online working more better for your blogs.

3) Monetization 

Do you like to earn money? Some may say "No" but maybe some stupids like me say "Yes".

You can really make some real $$$$ if you do serious blogging.

So, it is always important to look at the options available for monetization of your blog.

-> Wordpress -

Really it's difficult to make money from Wordpress.com because all you can do is place an affiliate link on you blog or sell your own product or use Wordads.

Wordads is an ad network of Wordpress which allow you to monetize your blog but getting it's approval is difficult and the rates are very low.

You cannot place third party ads on your blog, any affiliate banner or anything because they don't allow you to embed code.

So all you can do is place affiliate links, get sponsored reviews to earn money or use Wordads.

-> Weebly-

It is really better than Wordpress.com because you can place AdSense ads on your blog and any other third party ads.

It is easy to place affiliate banners because you can embed code on the blog.  

So you get total freedom on monetization.

-> Wix -

It goes the same with Weebly, You can do all the same thing as you can do with Weebly.

Get banner ads, affiliate marketing all the thing that you can do.

You can also easily sell your product.( This can be done on any blogging platform)

->Blogger-

I think this gives the total freedom to monetize your blog. You can place your ads anywhere you want.

I think blogger gives much freedom to you in case of monetization.

 4) Usability

I feel really cool looking at brand new smartphones.

Yes, the iris scanner on smartphones looks just awesome.

And the much awaited iphone8's Augmanted Reality(AR) feature is also killer.

But know What My Grandpa just hates smartphones.

He don't care about RAM, processor, sensors, camera and all that cool stuff.

He also find it difficult to make a phone call because he's used to feel the button and don't like to play with touchscreen.

Okay just getting off from my Grandpa, I want to tell you that it is very difficult to handle something which is very complicated.

Usability is the product of simplicity.If something is simple it is really going to be easy.


-> Blogger

I don't think any blogging platform is as simple as Blogger because there are not many things available.

It's usability comes with a price. the price of it is old looking themes and design as compared with others.

But no matter as you know everything comes with price.


-> Weebly


Weebly is basically a drag and drop website builder and it is always easy to drag and drop.

It is also simple but there are some fancy things which you have to get used to understand it.

But, it is also simple to use and you will find it easy after some try.


-> Wix

Wix is also a drag and drop website builder. I don't think there is much difference between using Weebly and Wix.

I only found that the elements(tools) in Wix is not so arranged as in Weebly.

Nevertheless, it is also much user-friendly. 


-> Wordpress.com

It is also same same as others, you will not find yourself in a situation where you will be itching your head and biting your nails.

Maybe you find Wordpress.org the premium version of Wordpress and the popular choice of professional blogger's difficult to use but that's not the case with Wordpress.com.

 5) Popularity

Maybe something popular is reliable. You may believe that all he folks who are using something are not stupid.

I have judged the blogging platforms but looking at various posts of professional blogger, finding blogs on search engine that use these platforms.

-> Blogger

I think being the oldest Blogging platforms, you will many quality blogs using it still now. These blogs also rank on first page of search engines for some good keywords with traffic. 

Many professional bloggers started their journey with Blogger only
and recommend using it.

You will also find many articles on Blogger ( how to's) also many youtube tutorials.

so you will find easy if you get stuck on some problem.

-> Wordpress.com

Wordpress.org is widely popular among professional bloggers but it's free hosting platform is not so popular because it does not offer many monetization options.

But I found few Wordpress.com hosted blog which ranks on search engines.

-> Weebly

It is also popular because it allows many monetization options.

Though it is difficult to find free blogs of Weebly on search engine

->Wix

Wix is not so popular as Weebly maybe as I don't find much blogs using blogger but I think it is popular than Wordpress.org because it allows monetization of blogs through Adsense.
    

 Conclusion

I think blogger is the best platform that's why I use it now. I may have chosen Weebly or Wix but I found that getting success with them look's easy but it's not.

I'm not sure about getting success with them because I've not found any free blogs of Weebly, Wix and Wordpress.com doing great, But I have found many blogs on Blogger doing great.

Even you can run Adsense on Weebly and Wix but  I have not found any blogs of them running Adsense.

And many Blogger's blogs have Adsense approval and runs ads and make a good amount of money.

[ Note-: Getting Adsense approval is not so easy.]

Why I think Blogger is good?

• getting Adsense approval is easier.
• 100% control on blog
• indexing is easier and getting traffic
• there are many popular blogs using it and doing great( proof for success)

Why Wix, Weebly, Wordpress.comare doubtful?

• Ads are displayed by Wix, Weebly, Wordpress.com they may not share revenue with you and you do not have control over it(You cannot disable it).
• you do not get much control
• getting Adsense approval is difficult

Wrapping up

At last, I think if you are really serious about blogging and want to do it completely free then use Blogger.

What's your choice? Please let me know in the comments section.