First off, let’s be clear: there are lots of ways to set up a blog. There are some great platforms out there and you really should try them to see what blogging is all about and whether you’re really into it.

But we can’t cover every angle, here, so let’s take a look at two of the big boys:

• Blogger, from Google, is free.  It’s easy.  There are some great templates and it’s easy to use.  Hard to criticise, really, other than to say it’s a little limited when it comes to development later on and it has relatively limited scope to allow you to present your blog commercially.
WordPress is a deeper platform than blogger, in our view, and is used by beginners to professional bloggers.  It’s an extremely flexible piece of open source software, which you can use for free.  You can, very very quickly have your blog up and running and hosted on WordPress’ own servers. OR you can choose to get your own hosting, which we’d recommend as you have better control over your blog and don’t have the limitations which you can encounter with the wordpress-hosted version.

For other options, take a look at here which looks at the software and some successful blogs using it.

WordPress really does have a ’5 minute install’ – you have very little to lose by trying it, other than some time.  And most people can spare 5 minutes

If you need good hosting for WordPress, here is a great well-known host or relatively smaller but good-value hosting is available here.

This post is NOT designed to sell WordPress as a blog platform.  There’s no benefit in that for us at all.  It’s simply that we use it, as do millions of others.

Whilst you’re thinking about it, three more reasons to give it a try:

1. “DIY”
With WordPress you become a Do-It-Yourself blogger/web site owner. No more waiting for and paying a programmer to fix a tiny error, saving you time and potentially lots of money.  You do what you want when you want it.

2. Big community, available online
WordPress is online and offers multiple users on many many sites of different varieties.  This means you’re not the only one who can fix something straight away and you can login from anywhere in the world – you have your own support network available, ready-made. And you can access it from anywhere. Result: if you’ve got web access in the North Pole, you could maintain your blog/site from there, plus get help on doing so at the same time.

3. Be found – if no-one can see you, why do it?
WordPress makes it a lot easier to optimize your search engine results – SEO. Your blog/site is a lot more likely to rank higher in Google’s results, which means people are a lot more likely to find you.  Google loves blogs – relevant, regularly-updated content is what it’s all about.