What is blogging and how does it work? The term “blog” is short for “weblog“(website log) which refers to an online journal. Blogs began as personal mini-websites that people used to record their views, stories, hobbies, and other writings as well as photos and videos. A blog can be used to share insight into a particular topic or niche.
Blogs are also useful for business owners who can attract customers through creating written content online.
In 1996 Amazon launched its affiliate program which was the first program that was available to the general public. Since then more people started using blogging as a means to make an income online. (See when did affiliate marketing start). Many thousands of bloggers have written content on websites in order to attract visitors through the search engines; Google being the most popular one.
Affiliate marketing has allowed anyone to generate an income from blogging by referring blog visitors to products and services online.
What Is Blogging And How Does It Work?
Blogging works by creating written content and uploading it to the internet by means of a digital platform such as WordPress. The current platform I’m using to write this blog post is a WordPress website. You can also use free blogging platforms to write blog posts such as:
- Blogger.com
- WordPress.com
- Hubpages.com
Free blogging platforms like these allow anyone to create and upload content to the internet. Once up there, people can find the content if they are looking for it, and manage to find it. Because there’s so much content on the internet, getting eyes on your content is the main issue for new blog post writers. Since most people will use a search engine to find the content they are looking for (e.g. Google), the main goal of bloggers is to get free traffic by creating a lot of content which can be easily found.
This can be difficult though given the huge amount of other bloggers out there. It’s estimated that there are over 600 million blogs on the internet today! Yes 600,000,000! That’s a huge amount of blogs. So depending on your blogging topic, it can be extremely difficult to attract an audience to your content.
What Is Blogging And How Does It Work: Tactics Of Bloggers
The main search engine people use to find information on the internet is Google. While there are others such as Bing.com, Yahoo.com and duckduckgo.com etc. most people still use Google as their main “go to” for online research.
Any simple Google search will bring up millions of pages of results but the top few will receive the lion share of visitors. Bloggers aim to be in this select group of the search engine results pages (SERPS). Unless they are, their visitors will need to come from other sources or nobody will even see their content!
Other sources of traffic can be found through social media, back linking or sharing content elsewhere on the internet. However, it can take a lot of effort to achieve just a small number of visitors. If you intend on making money from blogging, you’ll need a huge amount of website visitors (traffic) to be successful.
One strategy bloggers use is to find the search phrases people are looking for by using Google’s keyword planner. The keyword planner shows searches which have been made already on Google for terms which you choose. For example, if you type “CD player” into the planner, you’ll find all the searches which have been done for terms relating to the “seed” keyword “CD player”.
By creating written content on a blog which targets specific keywords which you want to be found for, you can target those which you have more chance of obtaining a top Google ranking for. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
What Is Blogging And How Does It Work? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
SEO or search engine optimisation refers to the “tweeking” of content on a blog in order to improve the likelihood of it obtaining a higher position on the SERPS (search engines results pages). By optimising your blog posts, you can potentially increase your positioning and get more visitors from Google and other search engines. However, there’s no guarantees of getting a page one listing on Google (or any other search engine for that matter). Whether you do will depend on how Google perceives your content. Google uses a number of factors to determine how to rank content in the SERPS. These are some of the most well known of them:
- Content – quality of your content (and quantity) is a huge factor in determining the authority of your site
- Backlinks – often top ranking blogs have tens of thousands of backlinks from other high authority websites
- Domain age – the domain age is a factor and older sites tend to be given greater authority
- Time on page – how your visitors interact with your content (do they click away or stay on the site and for how long?)
- Social media presence – how much is your content shared on social media
- Interaction – do visitors interact and engage with your content (leave comments, share and post etc.)
- Plus many more
Making Money From A Blog
To make money from a blog you need to monetise your website somehow. This can be done in a number of ways even without a business or product of your own. Many bloggers will monetise their blogs by promoting other people’s products from it (affiliate marketing) or using advertising (e.g. Google Adsense).
With affiliate marketing, you can attract an audience which is aligned with a certain product. When visitors come to your site, you can offer the product directly, or give away a “gift” in order to get visitors to sign up to your email list. From your list you can then promote affiliate products. See the power of email marketing.
With advertising platforms such as Google Adsense, bloggers can place adverts on their blog and get paid for clicks made by their visitors.
Summary
So, what is blogging and how does it work? By uploading written content to the internet, bloggers can attract visitors who might be interested in what they have to say. Blogging can be a hobby where bloggers write a diary, journal or “log” but it can also be used for business. Business owners write content which will attract customers to their business. Or they use content to help answer common customer questions.