In essence, a blog is a webpage that delivers regular updated content, often stamped with a date & time.   Although originally blogging format was typically a text-based ‘journal’ style (similar to what I’m writing right now), now blog content can consist solely of videos, pictures, or even audio (podcasting).    Microblogging (like Twitter) is made up of very short updates, often 140 characters of text or less.  There are a multitude of free blogging services online where you can sign up for an account and start blogging today, and I’ll discuss some of these in future posts, but first things first:  Why should you blog?

You should blog because it’s a great way to deliver freshly updated content to your target audience and really get your message out to the world.  Sometimes websites tend to stagnate, going years without any updates, but blogging allows you to add something new to your site on a regular basis to keep your users coming back to your site over and over again.  Blogging can be an excellent marketing tool when it is done right, allowing you to give in depth information about products or events and interact with your users though comments.  Not to mention, websites that have regularly updated content tend to rank better with search engines, so your blog might help push you to the top of Google.   If you are trying to impove the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website, blogging is definetly something you should be considering.

So what about the cons of blogging?  In short, its time consuming.  I always tell my clients, don’t start a blog unless you can donate the necessary time to produce quality content on a regular basis.    In the online world content is king, meaning if the content of your blog is boring or worthless to the viewer, they aren’t going to read it or pay any attention to it, so you really want to make sure that what you are posting is relevant and interesting to them and that is going to require some thought and planning on your part.   Also, if you start a blog and update it once, and then forget about it for six months or a year, you aren’t really helping yourself either.   A blog doesn’t need to be updated every day, or even every week, but you shouldn’t really go any longer than 3 months without updating its content.

So, I hope that helped explain a little bit more about blogging to you.  Next time I’ll discuss my new favorite blogging platform and how you can use it on your website.