No doubt you have heard various people talk about “blogs” in the last several months. Did you know that the blog has been around since the late 90′s? It has only been fairly recently that blogging has become part of the main stream, gaining more and more favorability across the internet. In case you were wondering, the term blog comes from the union of the two words “web” and “log”.

Blogs are used for all kinds of purposes. There are those that think of a blog as an online journal, while many people use their blogs to publish information on subjects of importance to them and their prospective readership. Blogs are versatile because not only can they contain unique content, videos and references to links and articles from various other places on the internet, including independent printed matter can also be integrated. One of the most prevalent blog platforms is WordPress. WordPress is accessible as a free stand-alone site (yourname.wordpress.org) or the complete version can be enabled on your own personal domain, either as the main page or as a subdirectory (yourdomain.com/blog). If your web host provider uses Cpanel, WordPress can be found as part of a feature called Fantastico, and is activated with a few simple clicks of the mouse. We prefer the full version because it provides more flexibility overall in layout options and appearance.

Blogs are wonderfully versatile! Perhaps you believe that blogs resemble an online version of a magazine or paper; the truth is with the variety of complementary templates and inexpensive theme creation products available, you can develop your blog to appear in a wide array of layouts. You can even make your blog look like a static web page and now you can integrate it with Facebook!

With WordPress, uploading themes is as easy as a click of the mouse. The user interface is very friendly and by and large, sufficiently uncomplicated for non technically inclined people to use, as it utilizes many point/click, drag/drop functions. There are loads of “plug-ins” that you can activate to enhance your blog. A few of our preferred ones include a plug-in for SEO, one for Spam filtering, and another that makes your hyperlinks look nice. Adding new content is fairly straightforward.

You can also arrange your blog easily using prepared code from free to join affiliate programs like Google AdSense, ClickBank, and Amazon to create passive income streams.

One of the benefits about having a blog is that the search engines love them due to their dynamic content. Higher search engine ranking equates to more traffic for you. The strategy is to add content on a consistent basis, at least once, preferably twice, a week. It can be as basic as sharing a short video about a topic of interest with your readers. You should also encourage participation from your readers by asking them a question or requesting feedback on your posts. If you haven’t tried blogging as a means of establishing your online presence, you may find this is a good solution for you. Deb Lane and Stephanie Remers Marketer’s Edge