What is Blogging?

Blogging has come a long way from the late 1990s, when it was started as a way for people to share personal commentary with other internet users in an online diary format. More than ten years later, with hundreds of millions of blogs in existence, the industry has matured far from beyond the fad that many critics initially proclaimed it to be. Today blogging is far more than just a personal diary tool (although millions of those types of blogs still exist) – for a business, it can be an effective marketing tool as well. Besides being able to spread the word about your brand quickly and easily, maintaining a business blog gives you an informal way of connecting with, listening to, responding to, and engaging in conversation with your target audience.
The barriers to entering blogging are low: platforms like WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger are free, it’s simple to set up a blog on them in a matter of minutes, and you don’t need any extraordinary technical skills to maintain or publish content. Once your blog has been established, there many ways you can market it to grow your readership and, ultimately, expand your customer base. Although writing good content is critical to a blog’s success, if no one can find all your well-crafted posts, your hard work is going to waste. There are several ways you can make sure people find it, including optimizing it so you’re visible on search engines and joining other blogging communities.
Many Bloggers are able to make money from their blog by capitalizing on the traffic their site gets. This traffic is used as a selling point to potential advertisers: if your blog has a significant number of readers, and it falls within a specific topic, advertisers are often willing to pay in some form for exposing their product or service to an audience that’s specifically suited to that product or service.