Blogging – What’s it all about?
0Blogging has become one of the most popular Internet-related phenomenons and has aroused the curiosity of millions of people all over the world. Rather than becoming less popular it is becoming even more popular and blogs, more so than ever, represent a great opportunity for both those who create blogs and for those who use them. Blogging used to be considered to be a trend for keeping personal diaries online, but blogging is now far more complex than that. Mainly due to the fact that every web log carries the characteristics and traits of the writers imagination, interests and wit; or if it doesn’t then it should. The range of topics blogs deal with is incredibly wide: from politics and economics to sky diving and snorkeling, you name a subject and you can blog about it, even if someone else is already doing so. This is because a blog carries that personal style and feel previously mentioned. The consequence of that personal touch is that more often than not it is the author who is as important, if not more so, as the subject itself.
Another very important aspect to consider after the blog content and who writes that content, is actually the interactive format of the pages that allows visitors to take action on the site and engage with the blog writer or other visitors to the site. For example many blogs ask the reader to comment and engage in a dialogue, this is a great way of establishing a connection with the readers of the blog and for the readers to enter into a dialogue with one another as well as the blog author. You may even consider that blogging has set the foundation for many social media sites, because in a way if a blog gains readers and those readers engage through the blog and enter into conversations, that is the basis on which a community (albeit an online community) is formed. This is exactly what social media sites seek to do, some much more successfully than others. You will also have noticed over time how the use of social media tools have come to the fore, the most famous of all is the Facebook ‘Like’, but now there are Tweets, Pins and Google+’s (to name the main players) all being integrated into the blog format in order to make it much easier to share your preferences from those blogs with other members of the social media sites you participate in.
Part of the history of blogging includes the very first attempts to run an account of one’s personal life, and many blog owners liked to call themselves journalists or diarists. In the early days of blogging around the mid-90s, people enjoyed the experience of belonging to an online community that could go beyond all sorts of previous boundaries that existed. This was the time when the very first combination of text, pictures and videos were included in a blog, as the most accurate way of reflecting one’s life. Sometimes, bloggers transmitted live images with the help of various portable devices, creating what was called ‘semi-automated blogging’.
At the beginning, blogs were not individual pages, as they mainly existed as components of larger static websites. But with the rapid development of technologies, the ability to create and support a personal independent web log very quickly became available. The only condition to enjoy a successful blogging experience is to generate high quality content that makes any visitor return to the site and interact on it. Creativity and innovation are probably the best ways to define the blogging experience since it is now an extremely popular way for individuals to express themselves on line.
Presently you can find many guides to creating successful blogs because, aside from individuals, many small business owners perceive the phenomenon as a great chance to promote products and services online. Blogs are presently considered to be a big part of the Internet marketing strategies anyone can use for an online advertising campaign.
The great advantage of blogging is that it can be used to target highly focused markets, typically referred to as niches, to attract potential customers. This strategy is intended to ensure that there are less uninterested users that may visit a site and who are unlikely to make a purchase when they arrive on the site. We could say that, thanks to advertising and Internet marketing, blogging has actually become a very promising type of business that, if used correctly, can bring customers to a business who are actually interested in purchasing the products or services offered by that business. The consequence of this is that blogging has become a tool that is used more and more to support a home based business opportunity for individuals or to bring targeted traffic to businesses.
Not forgetting of course that individuals who simply want to blog out of interest in a topic or just for fun can still do so, its just that competition for readers is much higher now. So even for those individuals it doesn’t hurt to know some of the techniques that can give a blog much needed visibility and of course how to use social media to support the blogging approach and provide a facility with which you can engage with the communities on those social media sites.