Popular types of blogs include cooking, fashion, and sports. Learn more about other types of blogs and how you can create your own.
You may be surprised to learn that the first blog was written in 1993 before the name "blog" was invented. In 1996, the term "weblog" was spawned but it wasn't shortened to "blog" until 2000.
When blogs began, they met Merriam-Webster‘s definition that a blog is "a website that contains online personal reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, videos, and photographs provided by the writer."
But over time, the purpose for blogs grew into this second definition: "A regular feature appearing as part of an online publication that typically relates to a particular topic and consists of articles and personal commentary by one or more authors."
It wasn't until 2003 when the Mommy blogs began that blogs began to serve another purpose: To promote or sell products or services to make money. Since that time, blogs have become a necessary way to reach a target audience for most types of businesses, even if they do the majority of their business from a brick-and-mortar location.
What are blogs?
In the world of today with rapidly developing technology, blogging has morphed into a huge money-making enterprise. There are basically 3 styles of blogs in 2022.
Other than the small number of personal blogs, almost all blogs are written for businesses to meet the needs of a specific audience with SEO content.
And blogs are no longer limited to text content. There are vlogs (video logs), and most blogs offer content like images, polls, infographics, puzzles, and more to make them interactive. Podcasts, which have episodes of audio content, are a cross between blogs and traditional radio shows.
Blogs are usually constructed in a periodical fashion, where each new post shows at the front of the queue with earlier posts following in reverse chronological order. This allows you and your readers to have a framework or structure when they are looking for a specific post.
Reasons to blog
The most common type of blog is the small business blog. These blogs are written to market a business's products or services to prospective customers.
Why do small businesses need a blog?
Small businesses have a much smaller marketing and advertising budget than large corporations. They compete with companies that are household names or have massive branding campaigns. For example, Kleenex, the brand name, has become the household name for this product in most of Africa, USA and Europe. The product name is tissues.
So, to reach their target demographic, most small businesses have turned to the internet for marketing and advertising. Blogging is one of the successful ways to drive leads online. This is true across most industries and demographics.
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