What exactly is a blog and what is blogging? Many people do not know, yet they are interested and want to give it a go. What do you have to do and what do you need to be able to starting blogging? Read on…

A blog is basically a simple website, although a lot are far from simple these days! Originally blogging started as writing an online journal to share with people, but these days they have evolved and a blog is anything you really want it to be. It can be a journal of what you are doing and plan to do or it can be you sharing your thoughts about anything that you want. You might be talking about events that affect your business or you might be providing help and advice to your readers. You could even be reviewing latest products, films or publishing discount voucher codes. A blog can be anything that you want it to be.

A blog usually uses specialist website creation tools, which makes the process of blogging very easy. Although, if you prefer, there is nothing to stop you writing your own blogging system. But there are so many excellent blogging tools on the internet, mostly available for free, that there is absolutely no need to write your own or even pay for a tool.

When you start blogging you write a some text and post this to your blog. Therefore, a new entry is known as a post. You can normally also assign categories and tags to each post. These identify related posts by putting all of the same themed posts into the same category, or tag. Each post can fit into as many categories and tags as are relevant to it to help readers and search engines find their way around your blog.

A blog will normally display the latest posts on the home page so that search engines and regular readers can quickly see what is new and read that without having to explore the entire site. As well as these posts living on the relevant category and tag pages, plus their own page, they will also be indexed on an archive page based on the date their were submitted, usually down to month level.

It is this fantastic cataloging, that takes place automatically, that makes blogs so welcomed by the search engines and regular readers alike. And because they are so easy to use, anyone can quickly have a well organised website in minute. But, there are also other tricks such as Pings, which notify search engines that a new post has been written and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that allows readers to see what you have recently written without having to visit the website!

So what do you need to do to start blogging? The first step is to set up your blog and then after that you just write regular posts. How long they are, whether they have images, graphics or illustrations and how frequently you write is entirely up to you, There are no restrictions as to what you need to do – it is your blog, so do with it as you like!

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