There is no need to pay to establish a blog, at least not in my book. In fact, I highly recommend against having a “you have to pay for it” blog. The way I see it, if you come across a blog that says you have to pay something to subscribe to having it, move on and don’t give that place a dime.
One of the most popular sites to establish a blog with is that living Net legend, Google and its Blogger blog system. It’s very easy to set up a Blogger blog. You choose your name–if you already have a Google account in some way such as AdSense or AdSense or G-Mail or anything like that, they will automatically let you use your account identity to set up your Blogger blogs (by the way, you can have all the blogs you want, so if you are really prolific and have wide interests you could blog about a host of different topics, and even make money from them all if you can match quantity up to quality). Google’s Blogger has recently moved out of its Beta phase and is now into its, um, alpha phase I guess. At any rate, what this means for you is that it’s no longer a kind of experiment with bugs being worked out, it’s a full-blown blogging system and it’s one of the very best. You can choose from a wide array of templates and most of them are very attractive and well-organized. Customization of your look and layout is very easy to achieve, too. You can quickly and with minimal effort get your blog on Blogger looking just right, and expressive of your unique personality, character, and voice. Managing the blog is easy, too, and as with all things Google you can always readily call upon some “help” to walk you through the process of customization, entering new posts, managing the account, and so on and so forth.
Another big player in the blogosphere is Yahoo’s 360° blog. 360° is a good blogging system as well. Yahoo’s 360° blog is still in the Beta stage, meaning that Yahoo is still tinkering with it to make it better and better, to add features and test market the ones that are already there. On the practical level this has little bearing on your blogging life, so it’s nothing to worry about. It means that you will want to be on the lookout for being able to upgrade things or change things if you ever need to as Yahoo progresses in its development of the blogging system that it uses. As with Google’s Blogger, Yahoo’s 360 has introduced blog tags (Google calls them labels) to allow you to label or categorize your blog posts. With Google this allows internal links, so that when you post a blog about a certain sub-topic in your topic, that blog can be linked to all of the other relevant blogs for the convenience of a reader’s navigation (readers love convenient navigation and intralinks like that). Yahoo calls its system a “Tag Cloud”, so that every blog that comes up calls up a box to the left of the screen that has all of the keywords that relate to it and to other relevant blog entries posted there. Yahoo and Google really do things almost exactly the same, only the looks and layouts are slightly different. Google and Yahoo both automatically enter you into their Blog Directories as soon as you establish your blog, and that is a very good thing for you. You can readily be found by somebody who does a directory search for a topic about which you blog, so that they don’t have to go through search after search on a search engine to come across you.
The other big player in the blogosphere is WordPress. WordPress does have some features that need to be paid for; however, they are all upgrades, and you would really only need to use them if you become a very serious blogger (perhaps a full-time blogger, at that!). From WordPress, you can buy your own domain or domain map, extra storage space so that you can upload podcasts or tons of photographs, the ability to customize your CSS (blog appearance and layout) in the event that WordPress’ choices of templates aren’t to your liking (again, I can’t see why they would not be unless you are getting really, really serious about your blogging life…you know, so that you aren’t getting any sunlight serious), and an unlimited number of private blogs (they give you 35 of these for free anyway). But outside of these, just as with Google and Yahoo it is quick, easy, and totally free to sign up for a WordPress blog. Like the former two as well, WordPress offers a selection of very attractive templates that allow for some customization. Like the former two, WordPress has tagging, labeling, or call it what you will. A tag by any other name… So what’s the difference between big three of blogs as far as quality? Not much. Check out each one and see what subtleties of appearance and features they offer that you prefer the most, and choose the one that suits your style the best. Or, establish three blogs (at least), one in each network. It’s really just a matter of options, but the point is these are the blogs that get read the most and they can all be set up and used for free.
