This is a really common question these days. Blogging is the latest craze, and it’s growing faster than you can imagine. The more popular blogs get, the more pop up every day.
But what exactly is a blog, anyway?
A blog is essentially an online diary.
It’s any collection of writings that is published online, at one domain, and viewable in a web browser. Specifically, a blog is a chronological journal containing text, photos, and other media objects. Your blog can be about anything you want, and you can update it as often as you want to.
Blogs were first introduced online as weblogs (thus, the shortened name – blogs) in the mid 1990’s. This new concept quickly grew in popularity and people started to use a blog as a means of communication on the web. The earliest blogs were personal – used to share news and photos with friends. Today’s blogs are being used more and more as a key marketing tool for businesses as well.
Business blogs can help promote services or products to boost sales. The great thing about business blogs is that they create a more personal relationship with the customer. For example, a business with a main static website can add a blog to that site for publishing not only new items and specials, but also local news, company and industry news, staff picks, or even just the weather. Since a blog is interactive, visitors can post comments on each blog post, creating that two-way conversation.
Personal blogs are created for any variety of reasons. Like a journal, people can write their daily adventures, dreams, goals and whatever else they want to share with their visitors. Remember, a blog is about whatever you want it to be about. There are no guidelines, rules, or Blog Police. You set the rules. Just be sure to post to your blog regularly, though, because if you don’t keep up with your posting, your readers will get bored and move onto someone else’s blog.
While blogs and websites have their similarities, they have a few key differences. A website is static as a blog is not, meaning that a “regular” website doesn’t change that often, and it isn’t as interactive. A website is a collection of related web pages, where a blog is collection of published entries in chronological order that can be published immediately or scheduled for a certain date and time.
A blog is supported by a content management system such as WordPress that provides a very useful collection of features to update the blog with. Blog features include comments, trackbacks, categories, tags, and an endless array of plug-ins for added functionality. A “regular” website won’t have any of that, and is more static in nature.
So that’s a little bit about the the difference between a website and a blog. If you’re looking to start a blog, head on over to WordPress.com to sign up for your own wordpress-hosted blog at no charge. If you’re looking to add a blog to an existing business site or other site with your own URL, you want to go to WordPress.org to set up a self-hosted blog with your own URL.
Need help setting up a new blog? Hire me and we’ll get you up and running in no time!
