What Is Blogging?

What is blogging? Everybody has a blog it seems, nowadays, including grandmothers and your sons and daughters have blogs. Blogging, once seen as something done by lonely males in spare bedrooms, has come of age. WordPress is now a mainstream website editing program used for static page sites as well as for blogs.

What is a Blog?

A blog is a collection of writings on one or more subjects by one person or by a group of people. It started off as an online web-log, but is now a series of posts, usually by the website owner about his or her favourite topic.

What do Bloggers Write About?

Absolutely anything. One famous young woman in England wrote a blog about her love life, in full and glorious technicolor detail. Every politician has a blog, as does every celebrity. Many blogs are about ordinary everyday life, looking after children, life on a farm cooking…

What’s the Point of Blogging?

Most bloggers write simply for the pleasure of writing. Companies have a blog because it has become an expected part of a company’s publicity efforts. It is just a 21^st Century method of communication.

Some people like the kudos of blogging, of having hundreds of people logging on to their website every day to see what’s new.

Some people blog for money and there are a range of ways to make a blog earn money for you.

How Do You Get a Blog?

There are free blogs on sites like blogger.com. If you are certain that you never want to earn any money from your blog then just log on to one of these sites and click the Create a Blog button. This kind of blogging is free, partly because your blog name will be something like www.patmcbridesfarm.blogger.com and partly because blogger.com puts ads onto your blog.

If you want a blog to try to earn a bit of spare cash, or you think you might use it for that in the future, then it is better to have a self-hosted blog from Day 1. This gives you an address such as www.patmcbridesfarm.com , which is much easier to remember. It is a bit more complicated, but still very easy. The cost is less than $100 a year for your first blog and you should get free hosting for any additional blogs, so every extra blog only costs you $10 for the extra name.

How Do You Write a Blog?

Most bloggers log on most days and post messages to their blogs. The blogging style of writing is usually in the first person and is informal.

Most blogs use WordPress, which is very easy software to use and free. Writing new posts every day has to be simple or nobody would do it. WordPress is doing for writing online what the printing press did for paper books. It is a program that anybody can use.

Cooperative Blogging

Blogs often have a facility that allows readers to contribute comments or even to make posts, it depends on how the blog has been set up. There may be a blogging team in a company who all have posting and editorial rights, while other company employees may be allowed to comment by logging in and the general public may only be able to read posts without commenting.

Is Blogging Safe for Children?

Yes, just check your settings only allow your child to make posts. Discourage your son or daughter from giving personal information away and from being too emotionally open while they are blogging.

Is Blogging Like Writing Articles?

If you are blogging to make money, or you want Google to rank your post then you should optimise your blog posts for keywords and phrases the same as you optimise your articles. Long blog posts are more likely to feature in search engine results, though most bloggers’ posts are less than 300 words, and few give any thought to SEO in their posts.

Do Blogging and Writing Articles Go Together?

Wherever you post your articles you will have links to use. If you have a blog, preferably a self-hosted, paid, one you can accumulate a lot of links pointing back to your blog, which can only help it to rank higher in search engines.

It does not have to be a blogging type blog. You can build an ordinary looking page-based website with WordPress very easily, and sometimes this works better in terms of increasing your credibility with your visitors.

Your blog site can include more affiliate links than your articles can. You can also include CPA links, where you are paid if a clicker follows through to sign up for a service or to actually buy a product.

How to Be a Blogging Success Story

Give visitors useful, preferably unique, knowledge that they cannot find elsewhere. Give, give and give some more. Do not start blogging to make money. Rather, you should be blogging to help people, to pass on your knowledge in a particular area. If visitors come to know you, to like you and finally, to trust you they are more likely to follow your recommendations and allow you to earn affiliate commissions.

How to be a Blogging Failure

More than nine out of ten blogs fail because the blogger’s prime objective is to take money from blog visitors. Most bloggers fail to give a unique insight or perspective on any subject; they even outsource their blog posts or use an article spinner to write them.