What Is A Blog?

This post was inspired by Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips!  If you’ve got your own blog, you’ve got until Friday August 15th to create your own “what is a blog” post and enter your blog in the contest!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, blogs and blogging are the latest “buzz” words on the internet. The stories surrounding blogging range from it being a way to achieve fame (Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge are two bloggers whose blogs have become household names) to being a way to achieve earning a small fortune from the comfort of home. (Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have written a bookon the topic ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.)

This blog focuses on using blogs as easy marketing tools for business owners to promote their products and services.

But you may be wonder what exactly is a blog and what makes it so special. In order to answer the second part of this question, you need to first understand the history of the internet.

Brief History of the Internet

The internet began long, long ago as ARPANET way back in 1969 and was developed as a way to facilitate communications for the defense department. Fast forward a few decades to 1993 and Mozilla released the first browser which allowed users of the internet to view the internet in the manner we do today, using graphics instead of just a black screen with white text.

(Try to keep this date in mind, because knowing this essential fact will help you when some moron tries to claim that he/she has been using the internet for marketing their business since 1992. )

Prior to the mid-1990’s, if you wanted to communicate with a large potential audience, you had to do it professionally. Authors, newspaper columnists, journalists, ministers, radio DJ’s, television anchors all had access to hundreds or thousands of people, but average ordinary people didn’t have this kind of access.

The Magic of the Internet

The magic of the internet was that the World Wide Web allowed anyone with internet access and the ability to code in HTML to publish information which could be viewed by thousands of people.

It wasn’t long before geeks and freaks were logging on and creating their own places on the web. (I kept the HTML files from my first place on the web from way back in 1994. You can see a copy of my very first website here: Waders.) In those early days, the web was not filled with the marketing madness you see today. As a matter of fact, there was a very LARGE contingent of internet users who were VEHEMENTLY opposed to the “commercialization” of the web.

During the earliest days of the internet, the term “surfing” came to describe the way users would find content on the internet. Each website would link to other “worthy” website finds. (Remember, these were the days pre-Google when Yahoo was attempting to index the web by using human beings to catalog the vast array of websites populating the online world.)

Making A Communication Connection

So, in the early days of the internet, one needed the ability to code in HTML and to transfer those files from the computer to a server, which is just a computer that “serves” files to the internet. For the technically savvy, it was cheap and easy to gain access to a potential audience of millions.

For everyone else, they had to wait until Y2K to gain easy access to the internet - which was provided by weblogs.

Prior to 2000, the only way to get content onto the web was to properly code it so it would display properly in the web browser and then FTP (File Transfer Protocol) that file to a web server account. However, with the advent of the weblog, suddenly the barriers of coding and FTP were removed. Less technically savvy users could EASILY publish content to the internet, so they could get their thoughts and ideas before an audience of what had now grown to tens of millions of potential viewers.

The Modern Blog

Blogs are simply software that makes it easy to get content onto the web.

Blogs today are being used by tens of millions of people who want to share information (content) via the internet. Sometimes that information is personal, sometimes that information is political and sometimes that information is to promote products and services offered for sale.

The modern “blog” is really just an easy to use “content management system” or CMS. Some blogs are hosted on individual hosting accounts just like “regular” static websites. These types of blogs carry the “responsibilities” of domain name registration, hosting and keeping the blogging software of choice up to date.

Other blogs are hosted on a common server (like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com). These common servers will host tens of thousands of “blogs” being populated by individuals and businesses alike.

In addition to offering an easy way to get content onto the internet, blogs offer other abilities as well.

• Blogs offer RSS
  Rss stands for “really simple syndication” and it is a method of keeping RSS subscribers “current” on the latest postings to the blog. Every time a new article is posted to the blog, the RSS subscribers are notified.
• Blog readers can leave comments
  Unlike a static website, readers of an article on a blog have an opportunity to leave comments directly on the article. This type of “interaction” is one of the key elements to “blogging”.
• Blogs can interact with each other
  Back in the 1990’s people “surfed” the web without the aid of search engines and blogs are bringing back that practice. Bloggers tend to freely link to other blogs with “worthy” content, just as early webmasters did in the 1990’s. This practice of linking between blogs is a very effective tool at getting a blog-style website better positioning within the search results.

Blogs as Marketing Tools

Which brings us to the rather new practice of using blogs as easy marketing tools for businesses.

Because of the ease of updating content, smart marketers can use their blog to promote their products and services. In addition to posting articles to article directories, a business blog can serve as an article repository as well.

One of the key elements of self hosted Wordpress blogs is that, when equipped with the proper plug ins, can be very search engine friendly. What that means is that when your potential customers are searching for answers on the internet, your blog posts (when they use the right keywords) have a great chance of appearing when they search for the solutions your business offers.

After years of empty promises, it appears that blogs may actually be poised to deliver the promise of marketing magic to business owners around the world!