A blog can have many purposes.
People use them as a source of outlet, recording their daily thoughts and activities for anyone to see.
Businesses can make perfect use of blogs to help boost the strength of their online presence.
Blogs can be used as part of a SEO online marketing strategy and they can be extremely beneficial to companies of all sizes.
As a professional blogger I have had the opportunity to work on multiple free blogging platforms and I have discovered that I have my favourites.
These are excellent for both promotional purposes and personal use.
WordPress All lists like this add WordPress into the list, and for good reason.
On a professional level I find this platform to be the best.
You can create professional looking pages very easily, and even upgrade to have your own domain for a small yearly fee.
Plugins and Widgets help you to personalise and optimise the site to your liking.
You may need to do a little bit of research into how to get the most from WordPress, but there is plenty of support for those who need it.
Tumblr This is a fantastic free blog which is extremely simple to use.
You can customise your page using free and premium themes.
Many will allow you to add a background and header of your choice to help you make it stand out from the crowd.
This is simpler to use than WordPress because it is a lot more limited, but that doesn't mean you should avoid using it.
For a great looking casual blog Tumblr is the answer.
You can create a promotional site which links to your main sites and join in with the widely active community.
Search for tags and start to follow people, and soon you will find that you have hundreds of followers yourself.
Posterous I had the pleasure of discovering Posterous through work writing about products for a well-known catalogue company.
I found that out of all the Blog sites I was working with, this one had the most views.
Posting is simple and it is easy to work with.
Again you have many themes which are free to use which is always a feature I appreciate.
Users can log in to comment using Facebook and Twitter but perhaps the only downside is that other Posterous bloggers are unable to reblog what you post unlike Tumblr.
Create a system of satellites As a business I recommend using all of the free blogging platforms to create a good spread of pages all over the Internet.
Theme each blog to one certain aspect of your company and then link it to the relevant section on your website.
To help optimize your website be sure not to create links away from it.
This will then have several satellite sites which draw attention to the dominant home for your company.