Blogging has become a popular online activity for the past few years whether as a personal diary, a hobby or an additional source of living. For those interested to put up their own blog for personal use, the most practical way to have it is through free blog hosting websites.  Not only that it could save you time and money from setting up a website but it is also convenient. Most of them give you the option to choose if you want your blogs be published either publicly or privately.  They also have an active helpdesk or support team to assist or guide you throughout your entire blogging life.

There are a lot of websites out on the internet offering free blog hosting services.  They use different blog platforms/software like Wordpress, Web 2, Movable Type and Drupal.  Among which of the popular ones are:

Blogger.com or Blogspot.com - is one and the same website and have been created by the Google team.  It is the most user-friendly website for new bloggers.  My favorite feature on this site is that you can choose among hundreds and thousands of widgets to enhance the look of your blog site.  You may even create and contribute your own widget to the site. However, you are only limited to several choices of provided templates/themes.  If you want to have a not so common template/theme, you have to research another source and edit the HTML code to modify a pre-chosen template.  Affiliate marketing programs aside from Google Adsense are allowed but can be limited or restricted to other affiliates.

Wordpress.com - is the most commonly used blog platforms by non-profit organizations. It is not open to other affiliate marketing programs other than Google Adsense. But the site offers a lot of freedom when it comes to customizing the themes of your blog site. You can choose from more than 60 attractive themes and you can always modify your blog’s theme in just one click.  It also features widgets and links to other social networks and best of all, it can give you relevant statistics as to the number of visitors/readers viewing your blog, the country they are from and which of your blog is the most popular or the most read one.

Hubpages.com - is the favorite site of many bloggers because everything you need in a blog is well provided for.  What’s unique with this free blog hosting site is that every blog or hub as well as the blogger or hubber (as they call it in the site) is being graded for each performance so you would know if you need to improve your writing skills or which niche doesn’t draw too much attention.  It provides you an easy access to top affiliate marketing sites such as Google Adsense, Kontera, Ebay and Amazon. You can also easily interact with your fellow hubbers because it is an active community where everyone can be a fan or have a fan, ask or answer each other’s question or request, comment or link to each other’s hub.

Other popular and free blog hosting sites includes - Squidoo.com, MyLot.com, Yahoo 360 and LiveJournal.com while others are not widely used.

Friendster.com and Multiply.com are social network sites where you can also post your blogs but you can’t post affiliate ads from which to earn, though you can use it to promote your business venture and other profit-oriented websites.

If you really intend to create a blog for commercial use,  it would still be better to buy a domain name even if would cost you around $9-10 a year.  This is because free blog hosting websites have some rules, policies and usage limit which may not be favorable to your business.

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