Unit 1: Introduction to Blogging ~ Why Blog?

Introduction:

Blogging is a simple yet very effective way to reach your market and captivate them with a regular stream of information about your products and services. It has come a long way since the 1990s. It can improve your website’s SEO and increase traffic to your website via inbound links. A blog can also help you build trusting relationships with customers and business partners. It is one of the best ways to build authority of yourself and your brand.

The video below will show you a few quick general blogging tips. Some of these we will be exploring, reinforcing, and elaborating on in the units to come:

Blogging has changed and evolved since its early days in every way—from the design and layout of blogs to the complexity of the software, even to the way people blog and the legalities regarding how media is shared.

Blogging has also revolutionized and pioneered the development and path of the internet as a whole. It has put the power of inexpensive publishing with a global reach into the hands of the layperson, and has allowed anyone to assume the role of journalist, correspondent, food critique, writer, poet, etc., with a story to tell.

Etymologically speaking, blog is short for web log, which got shortened to blog, and has since become the verb to blog, much as like the transformation that has occurred with other popular web terms and companies. Its web log root means that one of the original intents of a blog was to keep a sort of online diary of a person’s thoughts. True bloggers are still publishing these kinds of blogs today, but the term blogging has since expanded and become commercial. Today a blog is a powerful business tool. Successful bloggers like Perez Hilton have built a mini-empire and notoriety around a simple WordPress blog.

Speaking of WordPress, there are a number of blogging platforms to choose from. These include WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Weebly, Wix, and many others. WordPress is generally regarded as the most popular of these, due to its flexibility and advanced customizability. We will look at WordPress in more detail later on in the course. Blogger and Tumblr are also popular, particularly for blogs with a simpler layout that focus more on writing and less on brand.

Here are 14 of the best blogging platforms in 2023: https://makeawebsitehub.com/choose-right-blogging-platform.