Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Choosing a Blog Platform

As with other online business opportunities, one of the biggest advantages of starting a blog is its extremely low overhead. In fact, many blogging software products and tools are free.

If you already have a Web site, talk to your hosting company to see whether you can integrate a blog into your Web site. This way, the blogging audience that comes to your blog can easily cross over to other portions of your Web site, which just might lead to a sale.

If you're starting a blog from scratch and don't already have a Web site, try one of the variety of free or modestly priced blogging tools.

Although plenty of free tools are available to start a blog, you might have to pay a small monthly or annual fee if you plan to use your blog to make money. You might want to start with a free version while you set up your blog and become comfortable using it, and then upgrade to a paid account when you're ready to build revenue for the blog.

Check out these free sites to start a blog:

• Blogger (www.blogger.com): A free blogging site, Blogger provides templates and has no restrictions on the number of blogs you can maintain. See the next section to sign up for Blogger.
• WordPress (www.wordpress.com): One of our favorite blogging tools, WordPress has become one of the most widely used blog software programs. WordPress is free. Although it occasionally runs ads on your blog, ...