We hope you have loads of fun expressing yourself on your new blog. We’re certain it will be a huge growth experience for you during the coming months. You have now officially become a blogger. Wherever you’re going, make sure you enjoy the journey ahead.
Blog vs. Website
A blog is typically a section of your business’s website — but, unlike the rest of your website, you need to update the blog section frequently by adding new posts. Additionally, your blog is a tool that allows you to engage more with an audience, either by analyzing how many readers share your blog posts on social, or by allowing readers to comment on your individual posts. In this way, a blog is more like a two-way conversation than the rest of your website. However, a blog can also be an entire website, and often is, if the blog is for personal use alone — for instance, a travel blog.
A lifestyle blog is a digital compilation of an author’s personal interests, daily activities, or opinions on a subject. A lifestyle blog typically covers multiple hobbies or talents of the writer, rather than focusing on one subject alone. For instance, a lifestyle blog might include a section for fashion, health and wellness, travel, and relationships. A lifestyle blog is often highly personalized, so it can often feel like you’re reading a friend’s curated journal entries.
There are plenty of benefits to blogging — it helps drive traffic to your website, it enables you to better convert that traffic into leads, it allows your business to establish authority in an industry, and it continues to help your business grow and attract new customers months and even years after publication.
What is the difference between a wiki and a blog?
A wiki is a collaborative space where anyone who visits the site can edit, share, or publish content — Wikipedia is one of the most popular examples of this. On the other hand, there is typically only one person, or a team of people, with admin permissions to edit, share, or publish to a blog. Website visitors who come across the blog can potentially leave comments at the bottom of the blog post, but they cannot publish to the site or edit the posted material.
1. To help your company rank on search engines.
Typically, a business will use a blog to help the business’s website rank on search engines. You can absolutely employ SEO tactics, or use paid ads, to help your company homepage rank on page one of Google — but a more effective, long-term solution is blogging.
You decide to spend the first year writing and posting regular blog content that strongly relates to web design. Over time, your traffic increases and other companies link to your site for information regarding web design. When this happens, Google recognizes your company as a legitimate source for web design information. Eventually (with a lot of trial and error), your blog posts begin ranking on page one of Google for terms like "web design", "website builder", and "e-commerce website".
2. To share information about a given topic and become an expert in an industry.
After about a year, thanks to tireless blogging efforts and SEO strategies that enabled him to rank on Google, he began pulling in $60,000. Matt also created e-books, and used sponsorships and affiliate marketing to make money. Additionally, he wrote a New York Times best-seller, "How to Travel the World on $50 a Day."
3. To attract visitors to your site, and turn those visitors into leads.
There’s only so much traffic you can get from the homepage or About Us page of your company’s website. Of course, those pages are critical for leads who are already interested in your products — but they often won’t attract traffic from top-of-the-funnel. That’s where your blog comes into play.
Your blog can be a general resource to help your website visitors even before those visitors are ready to purchase from you. For instance, let’s say you sell products for e-commerce stores. You might attract some e-commerce owners who are already searching online for your products, but in most cases, the e-commerce owner isn’t going to be ready to buy right out of the gate.
Alternatively, if you begin blogging about tips to help the retail owner who is just starting out — like "How to start a retail website", or "Benefits of e-commerce vs. physical store" — you’ll slowly attract an audience who enjoys your content and finds it useful. Then, when those site visitors’ e-commerce stores begin growing (thanks, in part, to your blog), they’ll already know about your brand and already trust it as a helpful source. That’s when they’ll check out your product pages.
4. To cultivate an online community and engage with an audience.
3 Reasons You Should Not Start a Blog
But after giving you those detailed instructions, which could save you hundreds of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Keep in mind that these reasons are just our opinions, and we do not pretend to offer them up as a collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
- Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need to get that out of the way first. If your primary objective is to replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way.
The funny thing is that all these things can happen. You could make a full-time income from building a blog. We do it, Corbett Barr does it, and so do many others. And you could become an Internet famous blogger like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan.
But if these are the sole reasons you start blogging, you’ll be miserable because it will seem like a job. And if it feels like a job, you won’t be passionate about it, so you’ll either hate it or fall flat on your face (or both).
4 Blogging Resources
How do you make money blogging? How much do bloggers make? Can I make money blogging? Are blogs still profitable in 2022?
- Creations. By building an audience who finds value in our message, we’ve been able to offer our three books and our documentary, Minimalism, to an audience who is willing to support our creative work. Consequently, all three books have been bestsellers and are now translated into more than a dozen languages; and thanks to Netflix, our documentary is available in 190 countries. (For more information about our book-publishing process, read this blog post series: How to Publish an Indie Book.)
- Audience Contributions. Since we refuse to clutter our blog or popular podcast with ads, we depend on audience support to fund production of our podcast. With more than 5,000 supporters on Patreon and many others via PayPal, The Minimalists Podcast is fully funded with audience support, which means we’re able to pay for our podcast producer, filmmaker, and studio space without advertisements on our platforms.
- Speaking. As we built our audience, many organizations, universities, and conferences began contacting us about speaking at their events. At first, we starting speaking for free just to build a name for ourselves. Then, we started charging a few hundred dollars per event. Now, we’re able to charge significantly more money because the demand for our talks is high.
If you make money along the way, that’s great. In fact, if you help people solve their problems, you’re all but guaranteed to make money from your blog—eventually. Let’s just remember there are at least four resources that are more important than money: skills, time, energy, and attention.
That said, let’s not kid ourselves by acting as if making money is irrelevant—it’s not. Making money from our blog is simply not the primary driver for our creativity or why we became bloggers. Although people often think of money as the ultimate resource, it is the least important of the five mentioned above.
Money won’t necessarily improve your life, but it will amplify your existing behaviors. If you have bad habits, then more money will make your life considerably worse. And if you’re already a generous person, then more money can help you be more loving, caring, and considerate.
What does blog stand for? What does blog mean?
According to Wikipedia, a blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of “discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).” The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog in 1999.
There are blogs that cover nearly every topic, ideology, and interest—from sports and politics to religion and travel and everything in between. Even the world’s largest news organizations—ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, and MSNBC—all have their own blogs.
Squarespace vs WordPress: Why should I use WordPress instead of Squarespace?
- Design (Themes). Squarespace provides some beautiful templates, but they’re limited by the number of designs that are available. Since WordPress is a free, open-source blogging platform, there’s an ecosystem of tens of thousands of themes ready to satisfy every want and need.
Plugins aside, one key feature that’s built in to WordPress, but not Squarespace, is version control. Version control tracks your changes and allows you to compare revisions and revert back to a version of your Page or Post from any point in time.
How do I become a blogger?
The answer is in the question: the only way to become a blogger is to start a blog. This might sound overly simplistic, but that’s because it’s not that complicated. If you follow these steps you’ll become a blogger and start blogging today.
There’s an old truism, “Writers don’t like writing; they like having written.” I think the opposite is true for bloggers: because of the instant gratification of the WordPress “Publish” button, I find that bloggers enjoy writing because they’re constantly sharing that writing with the world.
What’s the difference between a blog and a website?
While the lines have blurred over the years, the simplest way to put it is that a blog is a type of website, one that catalogues, over time, the personal or professional thoughts and beliefs of a person or organization.
Are blogs dead?
Does anyone read blogs anymore? Is blogging a waste of time?
Millions of people read our blog every year-and our audience continues to grow because, thanks to our blog, new people find our work every day. But it’s not just The Minimalists who are successful. Blogs are popular all over the world, and they are the simplest way to publish content without middlemen or gatekeepers.
Authorship:
https://www.wix.com/start/blog
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-a-blog
https://www.theminimalists.com/blog/