Starting A Blog - What Is A Blog

What is a blog? Now that you’ve reached this site, it’s important to answer the most basic question. Before delving deeper into understanding and monetizing your blog, it’s a good idea to realize what people coming to your online property expect it to be…

What Is A Blog – Definitions

“A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files).” ~ Wikipedia

Here’s my own simplified “Indian” definition -

“A blog (also referred to as a weblog) is a website, or a section of a website, sorted chronologically into various categories by their subjects. Blogs can include most forms of digital media, including images, videos and slideshows.”

Components Of A Blog

Categories

Categories form an essential part of every blog on the Internet today. Imagine going to a site looking for the release date of the latest Shrek movie, and there’s no “Movies” tab to click on. How do you get there? Sure, running a Google search is always an option. But as we Indians would know, Google doesn’t always help us with getting where we want to.

For example, I typed Shrek and all it tells me is the US release date. Instead of running multiple searches, wouldn’t it be easier to just visit in.com and get the information you need? Thankfully In.com has a conveniently placed “Movies” tab, that gets me what I want. Conclusion: Categories don’t only help your readers, it also helps you appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Archives

Looking at the first page of this blog (i.e. www.bloggingindia.in), you might be convinced that there’s very little to my blog. Few pages, few ads, and that’s it. Or is it? In fact, there’s a good chance that this post, would be followed by hundreds more. So you ask – how do I access those old posts? Simple! My blog’s archives will help you find any post you want to read.

Here’s how it works – I write blog posts here almost everyday. Since blogs are arranged chronologically, a post I put up on Sunday, might have disappeared from the front page. Here’s where my archives come in. You can find all my old posts there.

Now don’t think of archives as just a boring old, dusty digital library of my old “stale” information articles – it isn’t. It’s just that I kept on writing about blogging and making money. Those posts are as relevant today, and my archives will help you get to them anytime you want to. For example, this particular post is in the category “Blogging For Beginners”, which would include similar articles explaining the concept of blogging for beginners.

Tags

Tags are another great way to organize your blog posts. Much like categories, tags are descriptive words or phrases about a specific post. Tags can be displayed in your blog’s sidebars, below posts, in fact – even converted into categories using specific plugins.

Tags for this post would include “Blogging 101″, “Blog Components”, etc.

Comments

Not all blogs use comments – they ought to! Comments fuels any blog, helping blogger to gain loyal readers and followers. Imagine writing on and on, without a single reply from those reading your blog. How do you know if you’re making mistakes? Maybe somebody has a query, do you really expect them to fill an entire contact form? I’ve tried that, and trust me – it’s a bad idea. And hey, it also feels good to receive feedback from the community you’re contributing to. For me, I love to read and reply to comments and queries from blogger and visitors. It makes this venture worth the time and money I put into it.

To make things simpler, have a look at this illustrative video explaining the world of blogging.