What is a blog?
Short for weblog, a blog is an informational website or online journal that displays posts in reverse chronological order, showing the latest posts first. It is essentially a platform where an individual writer or team of writers share ideas and commentary on a particular subject.
Back in the day when blogs first started gaining popularity, they were mostly used as an online diary by anyone who wanted to share their life with anyone willing to pay attention. These days, however, these online diaries have practically been completely replaced by social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and their shorter-form status updates.
Today, blogs are used more as an article repository designed to help a website rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you are interested to learn more about this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: How does it help with SEO?
A blog helps with SEO in two ways:
- By driving more traffic to a website
- By establishing a website as an authority on a specific topic
First, you can use it to drive more traffic to your website by publishing content on the topic your target customers are interested in.
For instance, if you teach drum lessons online, then you can publish drum tips, buying guides, gear reviews, drills, interviews, and other similar content. This way, when your target customers search for these things online, Google can recommend your posts to them without you having to actively do anything.
Now, the more content you post on drum-related topics and the more people visit your blog and share or link to your posts, the more you appear as an authority on the subject to Google, ultimately improving your ranking on its SERPs.
Question #2: How do I optimize my blog for SEO?
Just because you publish a lot of posts on a specific topic, however, does not automatically mean you will rank higher on SERPs. If you want to optimize your blog for SEO, you will need to do things, such as:
- Use the right keywords the appropriate number of times
- Use the right section markers (e.g., headers, subheadings)
- Use the right alt text for the images you use
- Use content silos (i.e., group posts that revolve around a specific main keyword together)
Fortunately, you do not need to do a lot of these optimization tasks manually. There are tools you can use—such as Yoast—to either automate or make the whole process so much easier.
Question #3: What is the difference between a blog and a website?
The main difference between a blog and a website is the type of content they have. While a website typically contains details (or a sales pitch) about a company and its products and services, a blog talks about the many different aspects of a specific topic.
This, however, does not mean that you can have both at the same time. In fact, that is exactly what businesses do these days. They include a blog on their website and use it to drive traffic to whatever product, service, or idea they are looking to promote.
Let us apply this to the online drum lessons example we talked about earlier. If you sell drum lessons online, you can have a website that talks about your main offer and how it can help people looking to learn to play the drums and also a blog that posts quality, informative content on playing the drums with links to specific products on your website.
Question #4: How do I monetize it?
There are two main ways to monetize your blog: ads and affiliate links.
The first one, ads, refers to both clickable banner ads and advertorials. Clickable banner ads, as the name suggests, are just ads you display on your blog that takes anyone who clicks them to an external site. Advertorials, on the other hand, are ads that are ‘disguised’ as a regular blog post.
The second one, affiliate links, are custom links you get from a company. Whenever a user buys something from that company through one of your custom links, you get a commission from the sale.