Description
The Power of Blogging
A Brief History of Blogging
A blog is a type of website or part of a website. It gets its name from the term
“web log” which originally referred to an online log of partner websites, personal
updates and newsworthy items. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with
regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as
graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.
“Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even
message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that
distinguishes them from other static websites.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others
function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and
links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of
readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many
blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual; some focus on art, photographs, videos,
music, and audio (podcasting). Micro-blogging is another type of blogging,
featuring very short posts.
Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms,
including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early
CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet
forum software created running conversations with “threads.” Threads are topical
connections between messages on a bulletin board websites. They are so named
because they have an initial topic and then a string of follow-up comments in some
type of chronological order. A forum could have many sub-forums with many topics
and many strings of conversations and replies.
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The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a
running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves
diarists, journalists, or “journalers.” Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in
1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the
earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer’s Scripting News is also credited
with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs. Another early blog was
Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person’s personal life
combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and
EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with
live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals
were also used as evidence in legal matters.
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web
sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance
of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process
feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the
distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For
instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of
blogging. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be
run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.
Blogs and Money-Making
Blogging is more popular than ever these days and it’s one of the most
profitable advertising markets next to social networking websites. Blogs have the
distinct benefit of being absolutely loved by search engine bots and offering easy
link-back opportunities in the form of comment posts. Blogs are devilishly easy to
update and customize and since they require very little maintenance they can be
very inexpensive. Some very popular and very profitable websites are created only
with blog software. The beauty of the software is that you can customize it to the
point where it doesn’t’ look like “just a blog.” Blogs are one of the most powerful
tools an internet marketer has today.
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One of the primary ways of profiting from blogs is through ad programs like
Google’s AdSense. This only makes sense if you have a lot of traffic so getting
clicks is the absolute key. Another way to make even more money is to charge for
direct advertising space. This bypasses Google’s commission although it does make
it a bit harder to get advertisers in the first places. Affiliate linking is also a great
way of bringing in income. Instead of directly using your blog for advertising
revenue you provide affiliate advertisement in the form of blog posts; you use a
special link with a reference number that will give you a percentage of the profit if
the person who used the link buys the product (You set these up with your affiliate
websites). Of course how much money you’ll ultimately make on any advertising
paradigm depends on a number of factors.
You have to consider how popular your blog is, how many link backs you
have and how many daily visitors you get. Your popularity, daily visitors and link
backs depend ultimately on the overall value of your blog, which is controlled by
the quality relevancy of your blog posts. So, as you can see, writing a good and
effective blog goes hand-in-hand with using your blog to make money. A crummy,
ill-formatted blog will not get you any daily visitors and with no daily visitors you’re
useless to any advertisers or affiliates. In this book we’ll not only go over the
various ways you can create income from blogs but we’ll talk about how to make
high-quality, easily manageable blogs that attract visitors.
