What is a Blog?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I am a complete beginner at internet marketing and blogging. I had heard of blogging a lot before I decided to Get involved with the Empower Network and had read and enjoyed many blogs in the past, but I was not entirely certain of what blogging was and how it worked. Blogging has now become a massive thing, used by individuals and businesses. But there are some people who still don t know what a blog is.
So what exactly is a blog.
A blog stands for web log. It is, more or less, an online diary where you can write about absolutely whatever you want. Essentially, a blog is an online magazine, with the most recent content being presented first, like the front cover, with older content following in chronological order. Whenever you write a new post, you can instantly publish this post and it will appear at the top of your blog, or still using the example, the front of the magazine.
Blogs are quite often written on a particular topic. Some cover a different number of similar topics, such as this one. Whatever your interest, there will be a blog on it. The beauty of a blog is that the reader can search through categories or all of the older posts on your blog, and find an article interesting to them, even if it was written two years ago!
A lot of blogs use comments. Much like readers writing comments in to a magazine and the magazine choosing appropriate ones to publish in the next issue, readers can comment on the post they have written and, if appropriate, this comment will be shown. This often spurns off a discussion about the blog post between different readers which is both useful for the blogger and interesting for the reader.
And this is a whole lot easier then doing it via a magazine, and cheaper!
What can I use a blog for?
A blog has lots of different uses. Many people simply use a blog to journal. They use it as an online diary, to write out what happened during that day. They may have friends following the blog who will read about it.
Some people turn their blog into a business. If a blog has great content and is receiving a lot of traffic, the blogger may choose to let others advertise on their blog and capitalise on the traffic they are receiving. People will actually pay you to let them advertise on your blog, if your good enough!
Some people may have a blog which reviews products. People will view the blog to get reviews on products in the industry the blog specialises in. The blogger could then sell those products as an affiliate of the company and receive a commission.
Businesses may use a blog to both sell and promote their products or services, or create better relationships with their customers by not selling, but informing customers about their products, industry or even just provoking discussion by seeing what customers think about a product.
You get the idea. A blog can be used for ANYTHING and the above list is just a few ideas.
So How Do I Go About Getting A Blog?
If a blog sounds like it could be useful to you, or even just sounds like a bit of fun and something you would like to do in your spare time, you should first of all follow this blog on twitter @Adamempower to find out how the Empower Network can help you get started in blogging! If your ready to get started then click on one of the banners on this page and join the Empower Network!