What is a Blog?

A blog is a type of website or part of a website, and it first came on the scene about 10 years ago. Blog is a contraction for “web log”. A blog is often maintained by someone making regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other materials such as graphics or video. In essence, a blog can be considered as an online diary. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format forms a large part of a blog.

What’s the purpose of a blog?

Once you have a clear understanding and an answer to the question “what is a blog,” the most important point you must take into consideration before deciding whether you should create a blog is: what do you have to say, and how do you say it? A blog can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, depending on what purpose you want it to serve. If all you need a blog for is to share information with friends, then a very basic blog will suffice, and can be put together in an hour or two, whilst a business intended blog will require a bit more time devoted to it. People will inevitably return to your blog if the subject you write about and the style in which you write it appeals to them. With that in mind, your blog should be written in a tone appropriate to your blog topic. Keep it personable so as to invite interaction through blog comments and links back to your blog from other bloggers who like what you write about.

How to set up a blog

Setting up a blog is very easy, and you don’t have to be technical or have any knowledge of HTML to create one. Setting up a blog is as easy as signing up for a free, Google owned, Blogger account where you will be given your own blog address, for example: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com. It gives the facility to select templates, and you can set up one up in just a few hours. It’s worth bearing in mind that this will give you only a personal blog, and if your need is for business purposes, then it involves a bit more work. You might, for example, require a domain name, which will give your blog more professionalism – you might consider getting one from Hostgator.com or other such domain name seller and host.

For a business type blog, I would also suggest you use other applications which are also free to use, and they additionally provide more flexibility and functionality. The end result will be a professional site which you can monetize if you choose to do so. One such blog development application is WordPress, and it provides extensive functionality and gives you the option to seamlessly incorporate monetization facilities such as Google Adsense, Amazon aStore and other affiliate programs. To achieve that, all you need to do is configure, drag and drop appropriate widgets onto the desired position on the template.

Advantages of a blog

The following are some of the benefits of using a blog.

• Blogs are very easy to maintain, mainly because you can post online without the need of an FTP program. You can post from anywhere, not just from your computer, and the blogging software will automatically put your most recent post at the top and simultaneously archive older posts.
• Blogs are search engine friendly, and blogging software make it easy to insert keywords in your posts so that search engine can crawl and potentially find your pages.
• You can easily link your blog to all the social media networks simply by selecting one of many available plugins.
• Blogs are interactive, and because each post has a comment box at the end of it, your visitors can leave feedback and comments.

I hope the above helps to address the question “What is a Blog”, and at the same time give you a much better understanding of how to blog!

Wishing you every success!