This may come as no surprise but WordPress takes the cake in an online survey conducted by The National Federation of Independent Business via “SmartBlog on Social Media”.

They ran a poll and asked business owners

“Which blogging platform they preferred to use?”

…and the results are in!

Landing in first place was wordpress.org, the self-hosted version, with wordpress.com which is the hosted version coming in second place. WordPress is without a doubt in my opinion dominating the market share over Blogger and Typepad.

I must say that if you plan on blogging for business you do want to set yourself apart from the rest. According to Technorati there are over 112.8 million blogs in the blogesphere and that does not include the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. So I can totally agree why wordpress.org comes out on top of this survery.

One thing that you have to consider…

WordPress.com comes in a close second because I believe many businesses are trying to cut corners and are not willing to to spend the typical $8-$10 per month it costs for hosting and the $500-$2000 it costs to get a great looking blog theme designed. So the hosted version of wordpress has become the solution for many business owners who are on a tight budget.

But the few extra bucks it takes to have a great online presence for your company is definitely worth it. I wish that someone could take a survey of business owners who have hosted sites and those who have self hosted sites and calculate which sites generate more revenue for the respective business owners. That would be the ultimate deciding factor, but I don’t think that survey would be necessary.

The images below are from my original and very first blogs I started on blogger and wordpress.com. When I started those blogs I felt discouraged and did not write any blog posts simply because my blog looked like every other blog on the net and I believed that one of the best ways to set my blog apart from the rest was to take the extra step and host my blog myself so that I can have full control and ownership of my blog look and feel and it’s content .

At the end of it all it does matter whether which platform you use, if you have great content and you if are providing value to your readers. People will find out about you and spread the word. Take for instance Master Marketer Seth Godin who usess Typepad, according to Compete.com Seth has over 333,000 unique visitors to his blog.

So doesn’t really matter what platform you use, to each their own.

If you don’t have a blog and you fall into the 22% who are not blogging yet you have many blogging platforms to choose from, but if you plan on blogging for business I will recommend that you check out wordpress.org, they have lots of tutorials on their site to help you get going with your self hosted blog.

You may want to check out Free Blog Factory I have used them to setup, design and install my blog and they have a great system in that helps business owners get started with a new self hosted WordPress blog for FREE. This may be a great option for you or your company if you are on a tight budget…you can find out more about them HERE.

So until my next post.

Happy Blogging and  GO WORDPRESS!