A blog is a very popular type of website where, in the form of a magazine, its author (often an individual) periodically publishes content (called “posts”, “entries” or “articles”) to which readers can add comments.
If you wanted to have a quick definition of what a blog is, the definition above summarizes all the essentials. But you should know that blogs are much more than that.
The concept first appeared in the mid-1990s as a kind of personal blog that authors used practically as an intimate diary exposed to the public on the Internet.
But things have evolved a lot since then. It has been discovered, for example, that they serve as powerful digital marketing tools, so much so that they have revolutionized the professional world by democratizing access to Internet business.
This very blog, Citizen 2.0, is a perfect example: I founded it in 2011 as a mere hobby, a site of disclosure on topics that I liked, with some prospect also to generate revenue via advertising, but without expecting much more than a modest extra help per month.
5 years after founding it (in 2016), the blog had evolved in such a way that it had become (along with other websites that followed later) a family business owned by my wife Raquel and me: Wenova Online, S.L.
What is a blog for, what is it made for and what characterizes it?
Have I captured your interest with this example? Well, let’s now talk about the aspects that make a blog a blog, what it is for and how it can be brought to a point like the one in our case.
What is the difference between a blog and a website?
Many people wonder what is the difference between a blog and a website.
Well, what you must have clear is that a blog is not something different as such, it is a web page, but with some specific features, functionalities that make it a proper blog.
These features are implemented in web applications or platforms (software that is installed on a web server) and cloud services such as Blogger or WordPress that, thanks to this, make the creation of blog something quite simple and fast.
But, in addition, the most important, Blogger and WordPress, are free, a fundamental reason for the tremendous success of these platforms. Based on WordPress (the leader) alone, there are at least 25 million websites at the moment.
In addition, these platforms are not exclusively used to create blogs, they can be used for virtually any website of low or medium complexity. So much so that there are even major brands such as Sony or Walt Disney whose websites are based on WordPress.
So, what makes a blog a blog? Let’s take a look at it:
Periodic publishing.
Blogs publish content on a regular basis, similar to a traditional magazine that publishes new issues every X amount of time. Self-respecting blogs try to be rigorous about it by publishing on a fixed schedule of typically once or several times a week.
Blogging platforms include a feed functionality that allows readers, with feed readers such as Feedly, to easily keep up to date with all the blogs they follow at a glance.
Interaction with readers and community
Blogs were among the first websites, if not the first, to introduce the possibility of direct interaction with the author and other readers through comments.
This produced a sense of closeness between them and with it a previously unknown experience for readers that has been very successful and has inspired Web 2.0. It was the basis for developing ideas based on that concept, such as, for example, social networks.
On the other hand, it forged the concept of web community, a group of people who follow the blog in question forming the community of followers with a group identity that is articulated around common interests reflected in the blog’s theme, etc.
Nowadays this type of communities are formed in the same way around YouTube channels or “influencers” in social networks.
Marked informal and personal touch
Within this spirit of seeking closeness with followers, a more informal approach to readers is also logical. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that the norm is to speak to your readers as “you”.
In short, a good blog should always seek an atmosphere similar to that of a group of friends. So much so that even many well-done corporate blogs also maintain this style of communication in their blogs.
Blog posts and blog pages
Along with blogs, the concept of “post” was also introduced, which has since been taken to other areas such as, for example, social networks.
A post, entry or article is the content par excellence in a blog, they are the pages of new content that a blog publishes periodically every X amount of time. All blogs have a page with a list of their posts.
In this sense, the same term has also been applied to other areas. A “post” on Facebook, for example, would be a new publication on Facebook.
However, when we talk about “pages” in a blog, although technically they are the same as a post, the notion of static content is implicit, i.e. content that does not vary or varies very little over time.
Examples of this would be product and service pages or pages such as “About”, “Legal Notice” or “Contact”. These pages articulate the basic structure of the site. While posts are that “trickle” of new content that makes a blog a fresh and dynamic site.
Content organization by categories and tags
A last point that is very characteristic of blogs is the organization of their contents by categories and tags.
It is normal that a blog, after a few years, accumulates hundreds of posts. Such a large amount of content needs some organization, which is why categories and tags have been invented in blogs.
The categories are a coarse-grained division of the contents that must be coherent with the subject matter. The best thing is to have few categories, as a general rule, no more than ten, less if possible.
This same blog, which has online marketing as its general scope, has the categories you can see above in the screenshot of the section on our front page that shows a list of the categories to organize its contents.
Tags are a much more fine-grained division than categories. Also, unlike categories where, normally, a piece of content belongs to a single category, it is quite normal for a piece of content to have multiple tags associated with it.
Let’s take this post as an example:
If you go into this post, you will see that it belongs to the WordPress category and as for tags, it has associated tags like web design, wordpress design, templates, etc.
A blog can be a simple hobby or a powerful professional tool.
Along with the ability to connect with readers, another of the most important aspects of a blog is its enormous versatility. And I am not referring so much to the subject matter, but what to use it for.
This, in fact, is due to the very concept of a web page, which allows you to disseminate a given piece of information to potentially millions of people.
By now we are very used to it, but we must remember how absolutely revolutionary this was when back in 1995 or so the Internet began to reach homes all over the world.
The most important contribution of blogs (of their platforms such as Blogger or WordPress) was to make the creation of a website something free and very simple, available to everyone.
With this, everyone could take advantage of this potential, although it took years for individuals (and companies) to learn how to take full advantage of it.
Why blogs work so well in digital marketing
The great professional potential of blogs lies basically in the fact that they are, by their very nature, an ideal marketing tool.
Blogs make possible, and in a very simple way, what Seth Godin considered to be the ideal way of marketing, “permission marketing”, and which has now evolved into the concept of inbound marketing:
This is so for several reasons: first, they allow to attract in a natural way (not forced and intrusive as in advertising) an audience with interest in a certain topic through search engines and other traffic sources (social networks, etc.).
In addition, powerful platforms such as WordPress, along with email marketing tools such as Mailrelay (which you also have free options) have the tools to build loyalty to those readers who have reached your website and get their contact (email).
To attract this audience we simply have to create and publish content of value to these people and position it in Google (along with other actions such as publications on social networks, for example).
And this is where the real challenge lies: in creating content of this quality and getting it to rank on Google. But both things are more a matter of personal capacity and work than economic because the tools are practically free. And the knowledge of how to do all this is out there for free too, on websites like this blog.
Therefore, if you want to use it like this, a blog can be a powerful tool that will gradually generate a base of qualified customers (customers selected by their interests), in autopilot mode and at practically zero cost.
