As a novice blogger I know there are lots of platforms out there, such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and so on.  I love using the WordPress platform to manage the content for websites that I manage at work, and I enjoy stumbling around in Tumblr… I was wondering what the pros thought, which is the best platform for a professional blog and why?

I am with Brankica. If you are looking to blog for business, as a professional, you should definitely get a self hosted WordPress blog.

But if you are doing it just for fun, Tumblr is a really good choice.

This is a question I’ve looked into in some depth recently.  There have been a number of people saying that Tumblr is the direction of the future – technology wise, and not necessarily this platform. 

But what I found out is that to get the best value out of Tumblr today you need to b targeting the 20 year old audience and use the networking tools of Tumblr.

So, for most businesses today the self-hosted WordPress blog is still the best option. 

But I don’t know if that will change some time in the future. I’m waiting to see how WordPress integrates all this fun new technology we’re supposed to have soon.

I haven’t used Tumblr or Blogger, but have both of my blogs (and websites) set up on WordPress. My husband likes it because of its flexibility with themes and design–and the ability to create pages as well as blogs, which can have a completely different look and feel.

It helps to know enough HTML to be able to code simple things, however, and fix formats the way you want–so not a plug-n-play for everyone, but the platform is dynamic and flexible.

Thanks for all the hints everyone!  I love using wordpress now, and I use a wordpress blog currently for my personal resume (so I can include links, pictures and videos for projects I managed and get much more in depth). 

I must agree with those who do not hesitate to select WordPress self-hosted blogging as their first and only alternative.  WordPress is used on more than 20 million sites across the Internet and you will never have to worry about outgrowing the platform, sure you may outgrow your server but that it an easy upgrade or fix compared to moving your blog content from some other less standard platform.

WordPress is tried, true and scales beautifully.  Should you decide that blogging is not enough for you then you can use WordPress to open an online store, set up a discussion group or forum or even a social site.

Don’t box yourself in from the start, go with WordPress.

I have used Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.I think Blogger is definitely the easiest to use and free, lacks the built-in SEO side, but offers great customization options, going right to the HTML.  And there are tons of free design, theme templates you can quickly and easily install on Blogger.

TypePad and WordPress have more of a learning curve, but WordPress has the best SEO. You can customize them but need to know CSS for advanced customization. TypePad is what I use for my business blog, but if you want to ever transfer from them, it is nearly impossible as they hold the images hostage pretty much.  The post content transfers but the images are hosted there. My partner has a programmer who can do a complete transfer from TypePad to WordPress, but its costly.  Anyway, my point is that TypePad makes it very hard to ever move from there.  WordPress and Blogger make it easy to move if you desire to.

So, when helping customers decide what is best for them, a few things factor in…

• is the blog for business or pleasure (personal)
• is SEO a necessity or is it that they are just wanting to share info with family and it doesn’t matter if they are found on the web
• are they familiar with the computer and the internet? (many of my clients are older and scared to death so they go with Blogger to ease into it).
• what is your financial budget? Blogger and  WordPress.com are free.  Blogger again is easier, but WordPress.com has great SEO and would be what I recommend if building a business blog.

(I haven’t experimented with Tumblr yet, but have also heard of http://www.squarespace.com/).  But again, WordPress and Blogger are probably the top used. My publisher wouldn’t let me write a book on How-To TypePad as there was no where near the demand or interest as there was with WordPress and  Blogger.  I did even mention Tumblr to them (Apress) but again, not enough demand to warrant the expense of publishing a book on how to use it.

Hope this helps Heather  

We currently have our blog hosted on Blogger, with a copy of it on Wordpress.com because we have been tossing around the idea of moving it. Ideally we will do a blog on our website when it is redesigned in the future, so that also has played into whether to move to WP and whether to go to a self-hosted blog now with WP (we would host it on our own server), or wait for our new website.

But one thing I found last time I looked at WP.com is that it does not support embedded videos – you have to purchase an upgrade for that. Does anyone know if that is still the case and if so, have you done anything to get around it?

I appreciate the great info on self hosting on wordpress. I have began to learn a lot about doing so but am staying with blogger for the time being. In time seems like a move will be in order.
For now I’d like to get domains pointing to my blogs on blogger though and would like info on doing so if anyone can point me in the right direction.