What Is Blog and How to Launch It?

Do you know that over 600 million active blogs function across the Internet? This translates into a staggering 3 billion blog posts published yearly. Covering every topic possible, these platforms deliver valuable content and give answers to every question. 

Ahrefs has found that 3 out of 4 internet users read blogs, and over 80% trust the information they get, making blog posts the most famous content format. This opens golden opportunities for companies and solopreneurs to advance their business. Recent studies show that over 90% of marketers already use online publishing to achieve content, marketing, and branding goals. 

Not only has blogging become an integral part of our lifestyle, but it has also proved an effective marketing tool for businesses. Follow our guide, where we discuss the essentials and importance of blogging and uncover the basic steps to start your blog.

Traditionally, it is made as a one-page layout with quick navigation and several helpful sections such as a blogger biography, valuable links, privacy policy, and terms of usage. It is a simple, time-proven, and popular way to express thoughts and ideas online, correspond with others, and build an online community.

The main distinctions between a blog and a regular website are compiled in the following table.

Finally, a blog could be an integral part of a website.

Blogging has existed for over two decades, and despite the rise of social media platforms, it remains a popular medium for sharing information. It is expected to grow as more people recognize its potential to reach a wider audience, build communities, and connect with others. Let's consider the history of blogs from inception to current trends to see how they have evolved during these two decades.

1994

As online diaries exist from the outset of the World Wide Web, no one can say when the first blog appeared. Nevertheless, the New York Times Magazine has dubbed Justin Hall the "founding father of personal bloggers." He created a site called links.net and gathered and reviewed HTML sites that he came across in January 1994. 

1997

The term "weblog" was coined in December 1997. John Barger, the creator of the website "Robot Wisdom," developed this concept to describe his internet activity log, which, like Justin Hall's online diary, included links to websites he visited.

1998

October 1998 marked the launch of Open Diary, the first blogging platform with an open community approach, membership model, and opportunity to comment on the work of others.

1999

This year saw a boom in blogging platforms. Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga were all introduced during that period. As each platform tried to carve its niche in the market, it attempted to boost its unique features and improve user experience.

2000

In November 2000, Professor Adrian Miles started the first video blog, vlog.

2001-2002

As the sunrise of the millennia, blogging began to have quite an impact on many lives. Businesses and individuals started to take it seriously. Many projects appeared along the way:

Technorati, one of the first blog search engines, launched in February 2002. Melinda Roberts founded TheMommyBlog.com. Google debuted AdSense, which paired many blogs with relevant advertisements.

2003

2003 was an iconic year for the blogging sphere. TypePad and WordPress were invented, and The Guardian started its famous live journal.

2004-2005

Visual content took root. In February 2004, videographer Steve Garfield became the first-ever video blogger. A year later (2005), YouTube launched.

2006-2007

In March 2006, Jack Dorsey sent out the world's first tweet, marking the rise of microblogging with the invention of Twitter.  February 2007 saw the launch of Tumblr.

In March 2007, Tim O'Reilly proposed a Blogger's Code of Conduct.

2008-2011

During this period, the blogging sphere stagnated with just several vital events. First, bloggers started to report earning their primary income from running their online journals. Second, Google's algorithm began to interpret blog posts as less relevant.

2012

In August 2012, a co-founder of Pyra Labs created Medium. LinkedIn introduced its influencers program, which invites notable business figures to guest blog on its publishing platform. 

2017

WordPress rolled out the ".blog" domain, making it open to everyone.

2024

Here are some impressive statistics for the time being:

600 million active blogs globally serve every niche and target audience possible.  Over 4.44 billion people (77% of internet users) read blogs.  The blogging industry is set to grow by $417.85 billion between 2021-2025.

Blogs have evolved dramatically over the last 27 years. Not only have they become influential sources of information on virtually any topic, but they are also a reliable platform to express yourself, establish your business online, promote your products, reach your audience with a meaningful experience, and inspire others. 

In 2024, blogs come in all shapes and sizes. You may find them in every sector: food, travel, lifestyle, fashion, photography, news, and more. However, all of them can be divided into three categories: personal, corporate, and professional. Let's consider every fundamental type closely.

Personal Blog

The blogging sphere started with online diaries that eventually transformed into personal blogs. It is the oldest, most comprehensive, and most popular type. Although it has undergone changes and metamorphosis from simple entries to microblogging, at its core, it still stays true to its roots.

Personal blogs are run by individuals who use them to share their stories, experiences, interests, hobbies, and insights. Some are centered around a specific topic, while others reveal a person's opinion. You may consider them a personal diary that includes the owner's commentary in a digital format.

These individual websites are generally written in a conversational and informal tone. They might feature different types of content: images, videos, infographics, and interactive elements. The structure is not specific but adjusts to chronological order. Apart from entries, visitors may find links to the owner's social media profiles.

Professional Blog

A professional blog might look like a personal blog at first glance, but it is not an individual's online diary. It is dedicated to a person's professional activity and uncovers their professional background, expertise, and experience in the industry. It might have a diverse structure, cover various categories, and even have a non-chronological order.

A professional blog is operated by a person or a group of people who might work in the same or neighboring industries. It aims to further a career or business or achieve other professional goals. It is also a time-proven medium to attract and engage a like-minded audience, establish expertise in the niche, demonstrate skills and experience, and build personal branding. 

The main distinction between personal and professional blogs is that the latter is conducted to earn an income. People generate revenue in a few common ways: advertising, content subscription, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, membership, donations, online courses, coaching, consulting, and selling products.

Corporate or Business Blog

A corporate or business blog is an online platform where a company discusses niches, industries, trends, brands, products, and other aspects of its business activity. It is operated by one or a whole team of employees who contribute their entries. As a rule, it has a branched structure to cover various niche fields effectively.

The initial aim of a corporate blog is to provide relevant, informative, and valuable content to the target audience. Thus, the blog aims to build strong relationships with the community, improve the brand's presence in the market, and cement the company's position as an expert in the niche. 

Business blogs are also powerful marketing tools. They help organizations promote and sell products, boost a company's awareness, and build community around the brand. Addressing customers' pain points, they drive traffic to the main website or landing page, create quality leads, and build consumer loyalty. Corporate blogs can be divided into several types: organic traffic blogs, thought-leader blogs, news blogs, and campaign blogs.

The blogosphere is increasingly diverse and comprehensive, accounting for one-third of all published websites. It has an enormous audience, with almost 80% of users reporting reading blogs and spending more time on them than emails. 

It provides a reliable space to share your thoughts and opinions and is a great marketing tool that benefits any business. Over 50% of B2B brands have already recognized the potential of the blogosphere and believed it to be the best way to move a client through a sales funnel. Let's consider why running a blog for your company is essential.

Improves SEO and Visibility

Every blog post on a website is a time-proven tool for unlocking the potential of SEO. By introducing relevant keywords in the content, companies boost search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They appear higher on result pages and increase their chances of getting noticed by the target audience. This enhances the company's visibility and drives organic website or landing page traffic.

Establishes Authority in the Industry

A regularly updated blog that provides high-quality, evergreen content relevant to the target audience's needs, preferences, and expectations establishes itself as a reliable source of information and positions the company as an expert in the field. This cultivates trust between the company and customers and intensifies a sense of authority within the market and industry.

Amplifies Lead Generation

Used in tandem with a content marketing strategy that prioritizes the needs of your target audience, blogging can do wonders with lead generation. It increases website traffic, promotes products, bridges the gap between a company and its consumers, smoothens the funnel, and ipso facto increases your chances of converting prospects into qualified leads from the website.

Enhances the Company's Presence on Social Media

When you provide high-quality content relevant to your consumers, you give them something to discuss. Spruced up with keywords and hashtags, blog posts become a great piece of data to be shared with peers, colleagues, and friends through social media. This increases the company's visibility, expands the audience, and strengthens its presence there.

Builds a Strong Brand Identity

Addressing consumers' pain points and meeting their needs through informative, meaningful, and valuable website content allows the company to demonstrate and promote its expertise in the niche. It unobtrusively generates a sense of authority, establishing itself as an industry leader. This builds a strong community around the company and eventually turns it into a strong brand. 

Whether you are a startup, solopreneur, or a vast company, starting a blog for your business is an excellent idea as it yields substantial results. You might strengthen your presence in the market, increase your online visibility, inspire trust and loyalty, improve conversions and leads, and eventually turn your business into a brand. Follow these steps to understand how to launch it.

Step 1 – Understand Your Target Audience

Unlike a personal blog, where you share your thoughts with everyone who listens, a business blog is about delivering the right content to the right audience as it pursues the company's specific business and marketing goals. 

Therefore, start with a deep analysis of your target audience. Consider your niche, topics you want to cover, and customer pain points and problems you want to address. This would also help create a buyer persona so you can clearly understand what content you must produce to meet consumers' needs, preferences, and expectations.

Step 2 – Choose the Right Platform

The web is teeming with blog-building solutions. Depending on your business goals, strategy, marketing tactic, budget, and team capacity, you may create everything from scratch or employ time-proven software. Here is the list of the most popular platforms: 

• WordPress,
• Blogger, 
• Medium, 
• Squarespace, 
• Tumblr, 
• Wix, 
• Hubspot.

Some are free, like WordPress; others charge a small fee. When choosing a platform, bear in mind these professional pieces of advice. Ensure it :

• allows you to connect your domain name.
• allows readers to leave comments and interact with the website.
• has features that demonstrate your brand personality and establish a unique web presence. 
• has SEO-friendly tools to help you with search engine optimization and higher ranks on the results page. 
• scalable so you can grow your online presence smoothly.
• versatile, so you may integrate it with social media or introduce email marketing.
• has performance insights.
• has reliable customer support.

Although blog creation is not rocket science, it must align with your personality and brand identity. Sadly, even professional software may disappoint you. Therefore, it is highly recommended that a competent website page design agency address blog creation. The team of experts will create a branded blog from scratch or help you adjust your solution, like a WordPress site, to your needs and visual identity.

Step 3 – Develop a Content Strategy

Content strategy lies at the core of successful blogging. It ensures your actions perfectly align with your business goals and brand's mission. It creates a roadmap to your goals, channels team efforts in the right direction, minimizes wasted resources, and helps you stay consistent with your delivery. Here are the basic steps to develop an effective content strategy.

• Define your target audience's needs, demands, preferences, expectations, and current pain points.
• Set a clear purpose and assign short- and long-term goals for your content strategy.
• Do keyword research. As your blog influences customers during their journey's Awareness, Research, Consideration, and Selection stages, make sure the key phrases you want to target are based on that. Use them to create converting headlines and copies that deliver value.
• Decide on the type of content you will produce. Should it be a short or long piece? Should it have visuals, images, dynamic effects, or interactive elements? What format should it have: article, infographic, video post? Determine your tone, voice, and language.

Step 4 – Devise an Editorial Calendar

Preparation is crucial for a successful content marketing strategy. As the world of the written word is busy, staying organized is a great way to cut through noise. A website editorial calendar outlines what and when new material should be published. It lists the topics the company should post throughout the month or year. It might include critical information such as writer, editors, person in charge, keywords and phrases, goals, etc. 

Devising an editorial calendar will help you stay on top of your game, ensure consistent delivery, and meet the target audience's expectations. The professional advice is to make it available and accessible to all your team members to coordinate the efforts of various departments and create a unified digital marketing strategy.

Whether personal or business, bloggers are online content creators who use a platform to deliver high-quality material to their readers. They stand behind every post, idea, and user experience. They play a critical role in realizing content marketing strategy, achieving business goals, and ensuring the overall success of the company's online presence. Just consider their primary responsibilities:

• brainstorm, generate, and pitch ideas for blogs.
• research keywords to maximize organic traffic from search engines.
• stay current on industry trends and target audience's needs and demands.
• write and edit the content.
• create images, design graphics, and generate supporting visual material.
• customize blog posts.
• publish the content.
• promote new posts through emails, social media, or traditional advertisements.
• analyze blog post performance.
• adjust their content marketing strategy.
• network and collaborate with other brands or bloggers.

A blogger's day-to-day activities include quite a spectrum of tasks, but they largely depend on the niche, company goals, and strategy.

A blog is one of your most valuable marketing assets. It provides opportunities for growth and development and forwards the company towards its ultimate goals. It is increasingly influential in what it can do. However, to unlock its true potential and make it work for you, evaluating its performance to surface weaknesses and introduce timely improvements is crucial. Here are key performance metrics that you need to track to ensure the success of your blog:

• Page views depend on many factors, but they help determine whether your idea and blog post resonates with the audience.
• Overall blog visits. It gives a sense of whether you are growing traffic or not.
• Average time on website page. It indicates a level of engagement with blog posts.
• Returning visitors. It reveals readers who can be turned into loyal fans of the brand.
• The top-viewed posts hint at the most exciting and converting ideas, giving you a direction of what the audience likes and expects from your blog post. 
• Comments. It illustrates the involvement and engagement of the readers. 
• Social shares. It assesses the relevance and success of your blog articles.
• Click-through rate. It demonstrates how well content inspires actions.
• Conversions. It tells you how many new leads your blog post is generating.
• New blog leads. It demonstrates how well your blog is in lead generation.

Despite the rise of social media platforms and AI chats that answer any question you ask, blogging remains a popular medium for sharing and getting information. Starting as a personal online journal, it has evolved dramatically and carved out a niche.

Nowadays, a blog is used to communicate with the target audience, establish expertise online, promote products, improve your professional profile, and even make money. Millions of people around the World recognize its potential. Whether it is a personal, professional, or company blog, it helps to achieve goals and opens opportunities for self-growth and improvement. 

The good news is creating a blog is not rocket science. You do not need any technical skills. Choose a reliable platform and share valuable content with your readers. However, to achieve certain heights and goals, you must hire a website agency, devise a content marketing strategy, track your performance to surface weaknesses and introduce timely improvements.