A blog platform is beginning to be the standard issue for any business.  Some businesses, especially small businesses are starting to give out their blog address instead of their regular website address, which is pretty interesting, considering some people still think that having a blog is nonsense.  What’s the point?  Well when you consider that blogs are indexed faster by search engines, and that you can give a blog every bit of the functionality that a web site has at a tiny fraction of the cost, you might actually start seeing websites actually disappear from the Internet Landscape.  There are about 100 or more blog platforms you can consider but here are three:  Free Blogs

Wordpress:  This platform is the best if you have some programming and developer skills.  You get tons of design flexibility but with that come’s more responsibility with respect to maintenance.  Probably not the best for businesses looking to be nimble marketers.  Blogger is a Google product and has got a lot of traction because of its owner, but the best blog platform in terms of ease of use and built in marketing features that I know of is Moguling.com.  For now, they’re flying under the radar but with over 30, 15 second video tutorials at each step in the blog building process, people with little experience will benefit from this tool tremendously.  It also pings the major search engines and blog directories each time you post.  Then if you have a good post, they automatically list it in one of their directories with an inbound link back to your blog.  The Moguling.com business model is similar to Ning.com but where they are different than anyone else is that they have bloggers that work inside their network and deliver optimized content to your blog if you don’t want to do all the posting yourself.  A turnkey blog may seem sort of weird but not really considering that within a few months your blog can be at the top of the search engines so your writing actually starts to mean something (more eyeballs) much sooner than if you did all the writing yourself.