Welcome back to our ongoing series, Blogging Basics, where we give you blogging tips to create a successful blog. Click the link to view all of the posts that have been published in this series to date.

Here at Berries and Cream Blog Design, we work with a lot of new bloggers. Often, new bloggers are confused and overwhelmed by the blogosphere’s culture, terms, and unwritten rules and expectations. If you are an overwhelmed blogging newbie, this series of posts is for you.

A relationship begins with an introduction, and it’s no different with blogging. If you decide to blog, you will build an intimate relationship with your blog. So here’s your formal introduction to get this relationship started right.

Newbie, Meet Blog… Blog, Meet Newbie.

Good – you’re now acquainted. Let’s dig into the good stuff, like background information.

What a Blog Is

• a nickname – Blogs were originally called web logs or weblogs; “web” being a reference to the World Wide Web (now commonly called the Internet) and “log” referenced the fact that, like a ship’s log, a weblog was most used as a running commentary on events in the writer’s life. Weblog was eventually mispronounced often enough so that all that was left was “blog.”
• interactive – a standard static website does not offer visitors a way to interact with the site, but a blog encourages visitor participation through frequently updated information and the ability to leave comments
• frequently updated – Websites generally contain information about something that does not change often. With a blog, information that is entered on the site is generally updated very frequently depending on the writer. Sometimes blog writers even update several times a day.
• a library of all the information ever written for that blog - After a website has been changed, that information is gone and cannot be seen again by the reader. On a blog, new entries are added, but the old ones are not deleted from the site. Instead, they are stamped with the date and time that they were created, given a title and added to the blog’s archives.

What a Blog Is Not

• just a personal diary – blogs have evolved from online personal journals and now cover a wide variety of topics including but not limited to thrifty living, politics, technology news, and business promotions. You get to decide what your blog is about.
• hard to maintain – a website oftentimes requires coding skills and a solid understanding of the way the Internet works. With a blog, almost anyone can easily and quickly update a blog. It does not require any special working knowledge of the Internet.
• expensive to start – there are numerous free blogging hosts, like Blogger, where anyone can blog at no cost

We’ve Been Introduced. Now What?

The next step in this relationship is to begin understanding the blogging language and culture. The next two posts in this series will discuss common blogging terminology and blog etiquette.

Please do let me know if you have any questions about this post or about blogging. I’m happy to be of service to you.

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Category: Blogging, Tips and Tricks