What is a blog

A ‘ blog ‘ is a short word for ‘ web log ‘. A ‘log’ on the other hand is like a diary or note book for recording events in chronological order. For instance, let assume that you travel to another state or country. You now have a book where you write events that unfold on each day of your journey. That is a perfect example of a ‘log.’
The bible is also an example of a log because it records events from the creation of the earth to the last days
. When this log is kept and shared on the World Wide Web, it becomes a ‘ Web log ‘ which is popularly referred to as “ blog.”

Publishing a blog
Publishing a blog is easy and sometimes free. Some platforms such as blogger and wordpress offer services that will publish your blog for free. However, free blogs have their advantages and limitations. To operate a paid blog, you need to buy a custom name, which is the the name of your blog from reliable domain registra and hosting platforms such as Godaddy. You will register your blog for a specified amount per year with hosting on a monthly or yearly basis depending on your choice. And if you already have a website, all you need is to create a page such as the contact us page and use this new page as a blog. Just add new posts at the top of the page above old post with date and caption line above each entry.
At the start don’t be so preoccupied with your design and formatting because a blog is more about periodic entries of information with caption line and a date distinguishing each entry from each other. If you are using free subdomain blog or paid custom blog, I think you have less problem concerning formatting and design as most hosting platforms have a default template for managing your blog with ready made format and design which of course you can customize later.

Blog is about research and content updating
Blogging is about publishing information for already built audience, newly attracted visitors and searchers. As a result, it requires sorting for information. The best way to turn for information nowadays is the internet. You can ask search engines such as Google and Yahoo, about your chosen topic. Visiting blogs related to your subject is also good as this will help you to know what others have written about it. Reading visitors comments, for instance, is one of the ways I get information on the web.
Reading newspapers, magazines, books are ways of getting information offline about your blog topics. We should not forget reading e-books about the topic to get in depth knowledge. It is advisable not to go for blogging if you cannot take your time to research both online and offline.
It is also important to know that blogging is not ‘ copy and paste.’

Blog is about attracting visitors
For you to succeed as a blogger, you need to be attracting quite numbers of visitors to your blog on a daily basis. This can be achieved among other things through regular and timely updates. You need to be posting contents consistently to your blog in order to keep regular visitors and to attract new ones . Having many contents on your chosen blog niche will help you to rank high and visible to search engines. A regular updated blog helps to create a teacher-student relationship between you and your visitors making them to return repeatedly to your blog.

Blog is about SEO
One lesson you should take before and after creating your blog is “ Search Engine Optimization.” This means you have to learn about keywords, title, tags and meta tags, how to increase page rank, how to make your blog to be easily visible to search engines. For instance, as at the time am writing this article, my research shows that my search engine visibility score is 24/100 and as at the time am typing it the score has move to 26/100 which are both “ very poor “ and the PageRank is nothing to write home about. That means I need to keep on learning SEO strategies to make my blog a better one.