Blogs were originally online personal journals. The term “blog” is a shortened version of “web log”, and in the beginning people used them to keep personal notes, keep track of todo lists, or just share their daily lives with friends and family.
The term blog is also now used to refer to a specific type of web based software. Blog software is a very easy to use content management and website publishing system. With blog software and tools, people can build websites without having to learn HTML or CSS, and they don’t even have to know how to transfer files to their server via FTP anymore. Blog software allows even the most unknowing beginner to start putting content online, thus it has become extremely popular over the last few years.
Blogs are now used to run business websites, newspapers and magazines, article and content sites, shopping sites and just about any other type of website you can imagine.
Blog software is also used heavily by Internet and Affiliate marketers for several reasons: You don’t have to know how to build a website; you can start getting content online as fast as you can type it; and search engines love blogs.
The search engine aspect is a very critical one. Because of the way blogs are designed, they tend to be very “social” websites. By default they usually send out a notice to other websites when something new is added. They also allow people to comment on content, link to it, and refer to it from other websites. All of this interaction sends notices to a variety of places around the web, and that lets the search engines know to come and look at the site to find and index the latest content.
This definition is a very simplified explanation of blogs, so I’ll be getting into much more detail in the tools and tutorials areas in the near future. For now just realize a “blog” is still a website, and it’s a very powerful Affiliate Marketing tool.
