Creating and maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to market yourself or your company on the internet. Blogging provides a wealth of opportunities for both yourself and your readers.
Few internet marketing strategies afford you with the flexibility of your own blog. In this article, we'll explore exactly what a blog is, how to create one, promote one, and manage a blog so that it drives traffic to your website and helps promote your business and make you money online.
What is a blog?
In reality, a blog or "web log" is nothing more than a very simple website dedicated to a topic or closely related set of topics. A blog can stand alone as an independent URL, such as yourblog.com, or it can be hosted by a blogging website such as Google's blogger.com or you might embed a blog directly on your own website.
A blog generally consists of a few basic parts. The main blog title, which describes what the blog is about and tells viewers the general topics they'll find there. The blog will also have multiple posts or small articles that are dated and feature the bi-line of the author. Finally, the blog will feature a comments section where readers can post comments on a blog entry and interact with each other as well. Additionally, most blogs will have social sharing mechanisms where readers can share the information on their Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networking accounts.
A blog can be more complex than this, but in essence, what has been described above is the core of every online web log you will come across. Blogs should be informative and interesting, as well as optimized for search engine traffic.
How do you create a blog?
As stated above, a blog is a website, or a part of a website. If you are a programmer, you can easily write your own blogging scripts. However, there are generally two types of blog creation and maintenance options for the average internet user.
First, you can use blogging or website creation software to make your blogs. These systems include WordPress, Joomla, and other CMS type systems. These allow a great deal of flexibility and give you grammarly vs whitesmoke the ability to create entire websites around your blogs.
The second most common method is to use a pre-existing blogging application like the afore-mentioned Blogger.com. This website will allow you to build and maintain your own blog with only a very few clicks of your mouse. They provide themes, editing tools and social interaction that is very simple and very effective.
As mentioned earlier, a blog should be focused on a specific topic or category of topics to be effective. For example, our blog is about internet marketing, business development and website design. Very inter-related topics. It allows users and other entrepreneurs to share their thoughts, ask questions and gives them an ongoing resource.