I believe that the blog is a form of communication that has three components:

IT IS WRITTEN BY AND FOR PEOPLE

This sounds a little obvious, but here I mean the tone. A blog is written with a personal touch. The opposite of this personal touch is writing it in the impersonal or corporate tone used in generic press releases. The tone is close, honest and more like an email than a corporate manual.

IS UPDATED FREQUENTLY

Information published on a blog is associated with dates. When a blog loses its freshness, it ceases to be a blog and becomes a reference material. An important difference with other forms of publication is that in a blog it is better to make a new article to update the contents than to change the original article.

In this way it is clear to the reader that the first article was written at a time prior to the second article. In the normal pages of a website the date of creation is not important so they are timeless. In a blog the date of publication is a key piece of information for the reader.

IS READ IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER AND BY TAGS

The most traditional form of computer navigation is the navigation menus. This form is maintained on websites but as far as blogs are concerned the most natural way to navigate them is in chronological order. When you get to the first page of the blog the most recent articles are displayed. And to see previous articles you must go to “older articles”.

Another way to navigate them is by using tags or categories that group different contents. This grouping is done in terms of topics, taxonomies, ordinances, or anything else that occurs to the author or authors of the blog.

An important difference from other forms of publication is that the hierarchy is not defined previously and can be built as it is published. This makes the user notice a little more “chaos” or “freshness” (depending on everyone’s taste) and often you can see tags on a blog that have only one article.

Since it is not a scientific concept but rather something in the process of construction, a good way to explain it is by answering some of the most frequently asked questions:

What is the difference between a blog and a company website?

The blog is a set of articles that are published regularly. A traditional website is a set of pages that are “static” or that don’t change very often. I like to think that the website is more like a company brochure and the blog is more like the company’s “recent news”.

These concepts are not written in stone and you can see many more differences and similarities between the two in the real world. But as an initial concept I think it is a good approach.

Can a blog exist without a website?

Yep. There are companies that offer the platform for anyone to set up a blog and do not need to add any static page. All navigation within the content is done in chronological order or by tags. The only static page you have many times is the author’s biography.

Among the most popular platforms where you can create a blog without the website are wordpress.com, blogger.com and tumblr.com.

What types of blogs are there?

There are as many as there are types of people… in other words, there are so many. There are news, technology, travel. In other words, everything. This makes it easier and cheaper to open a blog than to buy a notebook.

As there are so many of them, they can be grouped like this

  • Personal
  • Organizational
  • Business

Objective of the blog:

  • Promote a Hobby
  • Generate Advertising Revenue
  • Supporting the sale of company products or services

Do people live of blogging?

Yep. There are people who have created media whose form of publication is the blog. They live on the sale of advertising space.

There are several recent initiatives that have had notoriety. Companies that started with a blog and grew because of the quality of the information and the number of readers they achieved.

 

Is there any program to pay to have a blog ?

There are free versions of the most popular platforms that allow you to have your blog without buying anything. Like everything else on the Internet there are also versions that you can buy. So formally the answer is “Yes and No”.

Now if you want to use a personal blog or start with your company’s blog you can do it without having to buy anything. You can use tools like wordpress for personal and business blogs.

 

How many blogs are there in the world?

Many. Depending on the source and date of the research some studies speak of 200 million blogs. And in addition two blogs are created every second. So now there are 90 more blogs than when you started reading this article.

If you are thinking about a blog for your company the most important question is how many blogs your competitors have and how popular they are.

If there are many, it means there are many readers and it’s good news. If there are few it means that you must hurry to be one of the first and get many readers… and it is also good news.

How often should an article be published in a blog ?

It all depends on what you’re looking for with the blog. If it’s a blog that documents your travels you must publish each time you travel.

As a general rule if it is a blog for your company you should write at least one article every month. I think the ideal is to write between 3 and 5 articles a week. The frequency of posting impacts how search engines treat you and the more frequently you post the easier your readers will find you.