Blogging

The word blogging comes from the contraction of the two words, "web log," which describes a kind of online diary maintained by someone. Blogging has become extremely popular since its early beginnings in late 1997. It was Jorn Barger who first used the term, "weblog" to describe what he was doing. In April or May of 1998 Peter Merholz made a joke by splitting weblog into "we blog" as a description of the practice of maintaining a weblog. Blogging became a descriptive term soon after. A blog differs from a static website in several ways. It is extremely easy to use for one thing as posts can be made through an online text editor. The structure of a blog is also taken care of in most cases, making blogs well optimized for the search engines. While many people use blogs to keep a record of what they are doing, or of a project they are engaged in, blogging has become a very useful tool for the effective promotion of a main website. Merchants, who have a main site selling a product, or many products, may have difficulty in getting their main site to rank highly in the search engines. If it doesn't rank high there will be few visitors, and therefore very few sales. A simple and very effective answer is to set up a blog. Companies employ people to make posts on a daily basis about their company, or about their products. Each post will have a link that points back to their main site. The benefits of doing this are two-fold. First of all they get a valuable back link to their main site. This will help their main site to rank better in the search engine results. The blog is likely to rank better than the main site and faster too. This means it will get increasing traffic. Some of the visitors to the blog will follow the links back to the main site where a percentage of them will purchase products. Of course, a company is not limited to a single blog. They can have dozens of them, all with someone dedicated to blogging every day making highly relevant keyword rich posts that all contain a link back to the main site. This very quickly gets valuable back links to the main site, as well as providing rich content that will in most cases rank well. The resultant traffic and sales is likely to be far greater than a single main site could ever achieve. Bloggers who maintain a single site and are dedicated to blogging on a particular topic can also de very well. It will take time to build up a faithful following, but it is being done every day by thousands of successful bloggers who are in most cases making a very good living from doing it. Most bloggers do not make their incomes directly from the sale of products. If they have a highly trafficked blog, they can sell advertising space to other merchants, or they can monetize the blog by placing AdSense ads, or some other form of revenue sharing advertising model. Blogging, done properly, has proven very effective and very profitable too. One of the most popular free blogging platforms is at Blogger owned by Google. Another very popular free blogging platform isWordPress .