Before we discuss how to start a blog, let us quickly lay down a brief on what a blog is. Technically, a blog is a webpage or a collection of web pages (virtual pages) that are hosted on a server and can be accessed using the internet. In conventional language, a blog is simply a virtual platform where an author or a group of authors or company shares its thoughts, writes articles or simply posts some content. A blog can be personal, official, governmental or of any other nature. In popular terms, blogs are personal and official. Individuals create a blog to share their thoughts or to promote their skills and talent. Companies use a blog predominantly as a medium to pass down informative content to their consumers and fans and also for some marketing purposes.

How to start a blog has very simple answers today. You can either settle for a free solution or a paid solution. Earlier, paid solution was the only option but that has changed with time.

First, you need to decide if you are going for a free blog. In such a case you need to decide on which free blog provider you would be working with. There are various sites that offer you the option to sign up, create an account (a blogging account) and thereby you are assigned a blog address. The blog address would be pretty similar to website addresses and in most cases it would have the name of the host of the blog along with a name that you have selected.

If you decide to create a blog on your own then you would first have to book a domain. The domain could be as simple as www.yourname.com or anything else. Once you book this domain you need to create web pages. If you are a technical person and know programming and web development yourself then you can design the pages and also do the hosting stuff. Otherwise you can have a professional do it for you at a monthly price. In this case, you would need a server to host your content.

In either case, once your blog is created, you would have some software using which you can create the content you wish to post to your blog, upload the content through the software and eventually publish it on the blog.

A blog can be a single page website or of multiple pages, it depends on what you are exactly looking for.

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To Blog or Not to Blog? It may seem like a question that’s reserved for people who just some pointless rants to make that need to be heard by others. But the fact is that blogging is no longer for the individual who’s looking to either share their opinion or educate others, or even those who look to write keyword friendly articles that generate organic traffic, which in turn generates some sort of small ad revenue on the side for them. Blogging has now become useful for not only the individual, but brands as well. Whether your business is large or small, you’d be surprised by the amount of traffic, brand awareness, and even revenue that you can drive from a simple article written every day.

Google, Yahoo, and other search engines don’t just love content. They love fresh content. When the information is published recently, search engines are more likely to favor those articles within their search results. If you don’t believe that, try searching for news that’s just occurred within the last hour or so on a national level. You’d be surprised to see what shows up within search results. Fact is that blogging and articles that you publish can be listed within search engine results within minutes after you’ve posted the article.

So how does this impact a business or a brand? When new products or news come about that are related to a brand, being able to be one of the first ones to write about it not only puts you on the top of search engine results, it keeps you there. No matter how hard others try, if you’ve got a well written article with some SEO focus to it, you’re going to show up within search results, and those who publish information after you will more than likely rank below you.

So when the question comes down to, “To blog or not to blog?”, perhaps you should consider a different questions when it comes to the success of your website, your brand and your revenue. Perhaps the question you should be asking is “To make money, or not to make money?”.

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