If you do a simple search on wikipedia for the word blog this is what you will find : “A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, 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.”
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
Today a blog is all about business, SEO, CSS, connection, metrics, analytics all sorts of crazy things but if you draw a line at the end of the day and you think about it , its all about the idea of instant global self expression!
Anybody, from any corner of this world is blogging!Mothers, fathers, grand parents, soldiers, teachers, politicians , everybody is blogging!
How does a blog works? In just a few easy steps:
login from anywhere to your blog platform (blogger, typad, wordpress etc.). Once you are in, you will be presented with a word processor like interface where you will input the title of your post and the text!Once you are done with that you just click publish and voila : in about 3-5 seconds that entry that you just wrote will be available online, for everybody in the world to read!The beauty of it is that you can always revise the entry, take it off
Beats the shit out of the old days of the web when you had to hand code your website and if you had just a tiny tiny error in the code like put a single quote instead of double quote you would break the entire thing!
Blogs can have multiple authors! Not everybody wants to post on their blog(s) every single day!So they will have guest authors on their blogs, people who will add actual posts, not just comments, and in that way a blog automatically gets new voices, new perspectives.
The name of the blog is very important! When you choose the name of your blog , try to choose it so it will match the content of your blog! So when you go to www.yourblogtitle.com , you will know exactly what you will find on that particular blog!And make sure you will never ever choose a title with a dashes ” – ” in it, or as well never ever put numbers in your title!You have to make sure that your blog’s title is easy to remember and you dont confuse your visitors!
When you create a new blog , it would be great for that blog to have a niche, a topic and stick with it!But thats not a rule, that if you dont apply it you will be screwed!But if you choose to apply this rule , dont think that you have to be an expert in the field! As a blogger you can be the expert that knows it all, you can do research and know where to find everything, or you can be the newbie that has no ideea about this or that, but he/she tries to fix the problem and fix and than share his/her experiences with the rest of the world!
One of the big big mistakes amongst bloggers is that they dont add that simple tiny feature, that allows visitors to subscribe to a particular blog via email! Ive seen a lot of blogs, that had just the RSS feed and thats that!And we all know what a blessing RSS is, but the thing is that a lot of people are still in the email world!They don’t know how to use the RSS feed or maybe they dont even know what RSS is!You cant force people to take time to learn something new in order for them to subscribe to your blog!You can add such a feature (subscribe via email) with services like feedburner which is free , easy to use, and works with most of the blogging platforms!
Once you have your blog up and running, and people are visiting your blog, you should really consider reply to your commenters! Why? First of all because thats what a blog is all about : interact with the world ; and second of all because if people come to your blog and see the comments , and see that you are responding to what ever comments you got, they will most likely comment themselfs!And comments are really good for your posts, because when a post gets a comment, that particular post will be refreshed in the search engine. Comments are the resurrection of your posts!
Also once your blog is up and running make sure you are mesuring your traffic tactics!Most of the blogs are using Google Analytics wich is a free service from google, you can also use Sitemeter, TypePad and Wordpress both have one built right inside of them!
OK!I think you got the basic idea about blogs! Now lets talk a little about how you can earn revenue from blogs!Just got a little interesting huh? 
Contextual text ads – text ads that are specifically aligned to the content and topic of your blog (IE Google Adsense)
Outgoing Links – Sell small text links on your blog that link to other sites.Used by business to increase their SEO ranking and incoming links (IE Text-Link-Ads.com)
Regular text ads – Advertisers rent ad space on your blog by the day or by month (IE AdBrite.com)
Contextual widget – Lets you host interactive widgets that provide affiliate refferal on your blog (IE Chitika.com
Traditional Affiliate Programs – Amazon Associates ; Commision Junction
Impression based Ads – Pay you everytime a Ad is displayed (IE TribalFusion.com)
RSS advertising - you can add ads to your rss feed
TipJars and donations
Pay to review – PayPerPost.com
Sponsorship
T-shirts, caps and all shorts of crazy selling merchandise
I belive this will cover the basics of blogging, but if i missed something, or you can add to this post please feel free to comment
Related Stories On FSM:
Sat, Jun 21, 2008
MISC