So... What is a Blog?

The origin of the ‘blog’, although not officially coined until 1997, is traced back

to 1994.  Short for weblog, early bloggers used the internet to create a form of online diary, outlining their personal lives. Suddenly, we had a way of sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings with the whole world. Soon, it took off.  As the years passed, blogging became much more common and new understandings of how they could be used emerged. 

People began to use blogs to discuss important issues, or to chart their interests.  One of my initial blogs – and one that I still keep today – tracks my response to every book I read.  Eventually, people began to see blogs as a professional tool and businesses, clubs, and aspiring artists and professionals everywhere embraced the blog as a tool for marketing and promotion.

Today – blogging is a big business.  Perez Hilton gets millions of visitors a day to his gossip blog and every major company from Coca-Cola to Apple have blogs available for their many fans.

Why are blogs so successful for businesses, organisations and people in the spotlight? That’s easy – blogs help you create and maintain a personality for your brand.  They make you more relatable to clients and help you demonstrate what makes you unique. For example, the Coca-Cola blogs often outlines all their charity work.  Who knew this huge conglomerate gave so much back to poor and underdeveloped communities? Readers of their blog of course! 

Blogs give customers and followers a reason to keep returning to your website, hungry for fresh new weekly content. The Apple blog is one of the first places they announce the release of new products – you can imagine the excitement these posts cause! And when they have finished looking at your blog, they might just stay on line looking at your other products and services too.

There are also benefits in terms of being visible on the net.  Each blog post is its own web page – and websites with lots of web pages are more visible to search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This means blogs are important to ensure you are visible to the people who are looking for you!

Blogs make great reading because they are often in a chatty and informal style.  Your audience can hit the subscribe button and receive an email each time you post a new entry.  They can then peruse this at their leisure.

Many big companies have professional bloggers and social media managers on-staff to ensure their blogs remain relevant and up-to-date, but smaller businesses and individuals have to maintain their own blogs, unless they hire a freelance blogger such as myself to assist with the workload.  This is a great way to ensure that blogs are at a professional level for publishing.