blogging basics

Everyone has an opinion on why blogging is important and the many benefits of blogging.  A quick google search presents you with lists upon lists of the reasons, benefits, and failures to avoid when blogging.  What appears on many "top reason to blog" lists include blogging is free, it lets you help others, it makes you a better writer, it's a marketing tool for your personal brand, it can increase your knowledge and confidence, and you can potentially make money from blogging.

So what exactly is blogging? And what is a blog? According to Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary, a blog is "a web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences." Blogging is "to maintain or add new entries to a blog" according to Dictionary.com. There are many ways for people to blog these days including blogger.com (which I am using), hosting their own website with a blog section, and even some social media's like tumblr can be considered a blog. With so many options it is best to pick the one that works best for you.

For this class I am using blogger.com to host this blog as it is free and relatively easy to use. Setting up your blog is also very easy and allows for a lot of customization.  You can change the format of your page, background colors, the font, and more to make it just the way you like.  When writing up blog entries the page looks similar to gmail's messaging for the text formatting options.  Blogger also provides the user with many easy to manipulate features such as adding pictures, videos, links, and page breaks.  Additionally, you are able to add labels or tags to your blog to make it more easily searchable, schedule your posts in the future, add your location or change the link for the specific blog.

Blogger.com also allows users to publicly and privately follow other blogs making it easy to stay in the know about what others are up to.  For this class I have tried to follow everyone else's blog to see what social media platforms others are choosing and what they are saying.  For businesses this could be very helpful to keep track of competition or those you buy from or sell to. Blogger also allows you to follow blogs privately so they will appear in your feed but they are not displayed on your profile.  This might be the way a company would follow competition.

For content of your blog the sky's the limit.  People blog about anything that is of interest to them, topics they are experts in, topics they wish to become experts in, random ponderings, life around them, reviews of products, or anything else they find of interest.  Many chose their blog topic based on who their target audience might be.  For this class, we are writing about social media platforms and other students in the class will be reading them.  For a business these are not as clear and may take some time to figure out who and what.

Lastly, as a social media platform Blogger works very well. Users are able to easily create and manage a blog and also interact with others through following them and commenting on their posts.  Readers of a Blogger blog do not need to be members so the reach of your blog is dependent on the individual's marketing ability and not limited to the users of the platform.  So far I have enjoyed the ease of blogging and experimenting with various formats and features. As the class continues it will be interesting to see how others are using the same platform but in unique ways.