What is blogging and Business blogging

If you are not sure what blogging is and you are a bit unclear about setting up your own business blogging site then this article might help you to get started.

Website URL
Before starting any website or blog you need to understand what the term URL stands for, which is – Uniform Resource Locator and in layman’s terms URL is the address of the page of a website or a blog. If you look at the top bar you will see that the URL on this page is https://www.in-business.org.uk/what-is-blogging/.

Blog
You might be wondering what a blog is, as there are still many people out there that might have heard of the term, but are still unsure as to what it this term means. The term blog is an abbreviation of “Web Log” which is effectively what it is, as a blog is a diary of posts listed in date order and displayed on the Web or Internet.

Blogging Platform
This is the background software which is used to create and run your blog and in most cases there is no need to pay for this software, as there are plenty of adequate free ones out there. The most popular are WordPress and Blogger (Blogger is not as good as WordPress, as you cannot use this as a sub-directory to your main site, if that is what you desire, so WordPress would be better) you can also use Joomla too and there are others too.

Blogging
So if you have a blog then you are a Blogger and then the process of creating and posting an article in a blog is called blogging.

Blogger
Someone who owns a blog and posts about a subject they know – a niche showing their expertise.

Within the blog you will have certain sections and terminology you need to understand, as follows:

Post
As noted before a blog is a log on the web of articles in date order and each one of these articles is referred to as a post.

Comments
Once you have published a post, blogging software allows visitors to your site to make comments about your post, which is what makes a blogging site different to a normal website. You have full control over these comments and there is software to help protect you against spammers. I recommend if you use WordPress for your blog that you use Akismet which will automatically detect those pea brained spammers out there.

Category
Certainly if you use WordPress you can categorise each post under one or more Categories, which helps visitors to read posts that have been categorised into certain topic areas.

RSS feed
The RSS feed where RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or alternatively “Rich Site Summary” and allows people to subscribe to receive information from the likes of blogs and to receive news headlines that they consider interesting. In order to receive and read these headlines you will need a Feed Reader. Every blog will have a link to a RSS feed and all blog posts will be listed on this feed and looks like this – if you click this RSS Feed link for in-business.

Blogroll
On each blog site there will be a set of links to other blogs or websites that a blogger considers to be relevant to the content of the blog. These site links are sometimes listed in the Blogroll; however, this heading can be changed to suit your site.

Archives
Each month that passes your blog posts will be aggregated into the month in which the post was made and then these are listed under the Archives section of the blog. You will then be able to click on the blogs prior months to see what was written in those months.

Ping
A pig is something that is very useful for blogs and the search engines. Each time that a post published on a blog the post page is “Pinged” off to all the major search engines. This in tern leads the search engines to visit your site and then update their directory and record your new content. Once your blog has got a high relevance on the Internet you can find that a post will be found on the likes of Google within hours of posting. The following are “Ping sites:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2/

This means that the search engines contain up to the minute information about your blog and is why blogs are so important for traffic to your business and your company website.