The first step in building a blog to promote your eBay auctions or eBay store is deciding on what blog platform you will use. Blog platforms fall into two general categories - hosted blog platforms and stand alone blog platforms. We’ll look at the most popular in each category plus one hybrid.

Hosted Blog Platforms

When you use a hosted blog platform your blog is hosted on the domain of the platform provider you use. The hosted platform option is popular with beginners because they are easy to set up, easy to use, and most of them are free. Three of the most popular are:

eBay recently began offering on-site blogs that a lot of sellers have begun using. Because of the restrictions eBay has regarding linking and permissible content, this feature on eBay is totally useless for building your business long-term. I recommend you do not use eBay blogs.

Google’s Blogger.Com is a free hosted service that has become extremely popular with hundreds of thousands of users. Blogger is a simple, easy way to start a blog but it suffers from two serious drawbacks.

• It has become the home of tens of thousands of splogs (spam blogs). Because of this Blogger has developed a bad reputation among many people and there are people who won’t have anything to do with any Blogger blog.
• Because of the above problem, Google has become trigger-happy when it comes to deleting blogs from the system which means you could loose several months of work overnight

I don’t recommend using Blogger either.

WordPress.Com is the hosted version of the popular WordPress blog platform and, although it’s probably the best option of the three, it still has restrictions regarding what you can and cannot do that don’t lend themselves to what we want to accomplish with an blog. I don’t recommend it either.

Stand Alone Blog Platforms

A stand alone blog platform is one that is hosted on your own domain/URL and offers you total control over what you do with it and how you use it. There are quite a few stand alone platform options available, but some of the more popular are WordPress.org, Movable Type, Expression Engine, PMachine, B2Evolution, and Text Pattern.

All of these are sound, well established platforms and any one of them will work for what we want to accomplish. The primary differences between them are:

• Some are free while others you will need to pay a license fee to use
• The number of plug-ins (we will talk about plug-ins in a later part of this series, but fundamentally they scripts that automate many blogging tasks)
• The amount of on line documentation and help available on line

Hybrid Blogging Platforms

A hybrid blogging platform is one that is hosted on the domain of the platform provider and offers the option of using your own domain name. Most of them charge a monthly or yearly fee, and in most cases, the flexibility you have with what you can/cannot do with your blog is aligned with the amount of the fee.

There are several hybrid blogging platforms available but by far the most popular is TypePad. TypePad is an excellent service and has a lot of enthusiastic users. The primary drawback I see to TypePad is that they have had some serious down-time problems in the past. Some lasting for more than a week.

Over the last few years I’ve used Blogger.com, PMachine, TypePad, and WordPress.org for The Auction Rebel and other blogs I use.

Based on my personal experience with these four and upon conversations I’ve had with bloggers using several other platforms I feel the stand along platform WordPress.org stands head and shoulders above the others and WordPress is the platform I’ll use to build the PaperPleasures46 blog. I’m basing that decision on the following:

• The WordPress platform is free to use
• WordPress offers a wider variety of plug-ins than the other options
• It’s extremely easy to use
• Well written, easy to use documentation available
• Excellent help sites and forums readily available on line
• I use WordPress for The Auction Rebel so there is no learning curve as there would be with the others

All other things being equal, if you are going to follow along and build your own blog, I would recommend you use WordPress.org also. If for some reason you’re not comfortable with WordPress I would recommend TypePad as an alternative.

Originally I’d planned on talking about choosing a name for your blog and choosing a hosting service today also, but because this has gotten longer than I’d thought it would be I’m going to save names and hosting for tomorrow.

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