What Exactly Is A Blog?

My clients often ask me, what exactly is a blog? A blog is essentially a personal or informational website where multiple authors can publish their work in the form of blog posts. Blogs provide people with a  platform to publish their thoughts, opinions, stories, and business interests on the internet. Therefore, they can feel seen and heard.

There are many reasons why someone runs a blogging website. It could be a personal blog where an author publishes their personal journal. Also it could be a business-oriented blog where the blog posts are related to commercial information.

There are around 32 million active bloggers in the United States. Just imagine the number of blogs there could be on the world wide web. Blogs help small and medium businesses to grow their consumer base by providing exciting and informative content. As a result, blogs could help potential clients know, like and trust you faster.

As far as big companies and corporates are concerned, blogs allow them to engage with their consumer base and create hype for new service or product launches.

There are countless things that a blog can be. It entirely depends on your choice of what you want it to be.  You can start a blog on travel, food, health, business tips, entrepreneurship, affiliate marketing, fashion, or any possible topic.

Your search for what exactly is a blog will end once you finish this article.

What exactly is a blog, and how is it different from a website?

A blog can be a website, or it can be part of a website. A blog is regularly updated with blog posts and user-generated content. However, a website usually has static pages that are not updated on a regular basis.

Difference between a blog and website:

• The most fundamental difference between them is how they present and store data. A blog presents a chronological listing of blog posts. On the other hand, a website’s homepage has multiple sections displaying data from the other internal pages.
• A blog has a commenting option that allows users to share their opinions about the blog posts. A website, on the other hand, has no such facility. The ‘Contact Us’ page is the only way users can share their opinions and views directly to the owner.
• A website is an entire entity in itself. However, a blog could be a website or part of the website.
• A blog is regularly updated with new blog posts. On the other hand, a website has static web pages that are hardly updated on a regular basis.

Now that you know what a blog is, let’s dive deeper into the specificities of blogging. If you’re wondering how many types of blogs there are, then let’s help you with that:

Different Types of Popular Blogs:

Food Blogs

Food blogs are operated by food bloggers and people who love to talk about food. In a food blog, you’ll find blog posts related to different types of food items, recipes, benefits of specific foods, reviews of restaurants & food outlets, and similar things.

Travel Blogs

A travel blog is usually owned by a frequent traveler or a group of travel-loving individuals. People who blog about their travel are known as travel bloggers. You’ll find posts like traveling tips, bag-packing tips, famous tourist destinations, good hotels, hostels, restaurants, and other useful information you can find in popular tourist places.

Health & Fitness Blogs

Health & fitness blogs have detailed information about healthy and fit ways to live. Most of these blogs are operated by health & fitness instructors who like to help other people to live a healthy life. You’ll find fitness tips, healthy food habits, and other health & fitness instructions in such blogs.

Business Blogs

Corporates and agencies own business blogs to generate their business leads online. There will be posts related to their services, products, and new launches on a business blog. A business blogger is usually an expert in online lead generation and online sales.

Personal Blogs

In a personal blog, the blogger will talk about their daily or weekly experiences in their blog posts. It could be termed as an online journal. Personal blogs used to be trendy in the early 2000s. Now, niche blogs have taken-up their place, and only a selected few of personal blogs generate traffic.

This list of different types of blogs is endless. There are blogs related to automobiles, parenting, lifestyle, politics, sports, finance, entertainment, and many more topics. In your quest of what exactly is a blog, you have hit a jackpot of knowledge.

If you want to know more about blogs and their purpose, please read our other posts in this blogging series.