What is a blog and what’s all the craze about blogging?

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Gary · Posted in Blogging

- What is a Blog

A Blog is a chronologically ordered series of Web site updates, much like a diary.

A blog can be many things, a diary, a review site, a photo gallery and even a marketing tool.

Blogs are good at generating high search engine rankings. This is because your content is fresh and current. This is key for any blog site that wants to attract new visits and retain existing bloggers. Search engines give a priority to web pages that have been updated recently or has new content on the keywords being searched. A better search engine ranking means more visitors, therefore more readers and comments. This could provide a popular blog site or a review site to come back to time and time again.

There are millions of blog sites around the world and according Wikipedia, the main blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.

Many people use blog sites to document changes in their life, this can be useful to share these personal details with others, like friends or family that you may not see that often.

An example site is Gizmondo.com, basically a gadget guide that brings out the nerds in many of us!!

- What is a Blogger

A blogger is the person or people who are writing the blog posts or a user that responds to the blog post/s.

- What is blogging

Blogging is a way of sharing thoughts and ideas with others. It makes the internet a better place.

Blogging and social network sites are the craze at the moment, even celebrities use these sites as a community to network with others. Businesses also use blogging to promote and build their business.

Heard about twitter, a free micro-blogging site that allows people to stay connected in real-time. Users can display updates to their network of friends via text-based posts via the Twitter website, RSS feeds, SMS text messages or through applications such as Facebook, Feedalizr, TwitterMobile, Tweetie, Twinkle and a few more.

Twitter had over 5 million visitors in September 2008 and could be a good network tool for Affiliate Marketers.

According to The Guardian there are many celebrities that are using Twitter, as this is a very popular way to communicate with your friends.

Blog sites can also make money, especially if it’s a popular invaluable resource.

The most common way to earn money from your site is from advertising. Google Adsense is a popular way to include ads to your web page. These ads can be matched to your blog content and therefore be of interest to your readers. Basically you get paid a refferal fee each time a visitor clicks on an of these ads.

Another way to make money from your blog would be from affiliate links. An example would be, a blogger is blogging about website design. He can look for popular website design software, templates, themes or anything related to website design and try and locate an affiliate program that might offer a reward (referral fee) for generating and referring business to the end merchant, so effectively the merchant sells more and the affiliate makes a commission for generating more business. Win win all-round.

Companies (merchants) have Marketing departments and they tend to have quite large marketing budgets and they may see this as a great way to drum up interest in their products and services. They use this marketing model to build up their business or promote their products. Most often they use an Affiliate network and pay only on performance, so its a risk free marketing.

A blog site provides a good means for the Customers to see others people using, commenting or reviewing products or services.

For anyone new to blogging, I would definately recommend reading the following books – Blogging for dummies and ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income.