What is a Blog?

Although blogs have been around for quite a while, a lot of people still don't know about them, and even those that do aren't using them to their full potential.
First of all, let me explain what a blog is. The word "blog" is short for web log. It's basically an online diary. You're probably thinking, "why would I want to write an online diary?". The short and simple answer is, you wouldn't , not many people outside your of friends and family want to hear about what you get up to everyday. However, if you write a blog for your website or on a specific topic, you're going to generate a lot of interest. So if it was for your website, you would blog about any updates that you've made to the site or anything interesting that's been going on lately in your industry. But Why Write A Blog About That Stuff?That question has many answers, all of which are vital for you to understand, especially the last one. Blogs are incredibly easy to update, you just log in to your blogging account, write what you want to say and then hit publish, simple as that. Now the whole world is able to see what you just wrote. No need to write html or do any coding (Unless you really want to), no need to upload things or even use ftp (File transfer protocol), and no need to manually link it to the rest of your site, as a blog can be a completely seperate entity if you want it to be. So as you can see, you've cut pretty much all the steps out of the equation for adding content to your website. So benefit number 1 is, you save yourself a lot of time.Okay Cool, So I Can Save Time, What Else?You can contact many people at a time, without having to worry about any anti-spam software getting in your way. Anyone who sees your blog can subscribe to it with an RSS feed reader. An RSS feed reader is a piece of software or website that allows you to subscribe to people's blogs and be notified when an update is made. This means that whatever you write goes directly to their computer, this also means, there is MUCH less competition for you in terms of what's going to be looked at, as people will choose to specially subscribe to your RSS feed. Once someone has subscribed to an RSS feed in a topic they are interested in, providing you provide high quality content, you wont have any competition for that individuals attention. You've Almost Sold Me, Give Me Something To Clinch The DealOk, so you want even more? What if I told you, that having a blog could get you listed in google tommorrow? Or if your website is already listed in google, how about being crawled and indexed more often by google? Well it's true. This means that when you write a search engine optimized page (I'll teach you how to do this in other articles), not only will it appear in the search results pretty quickly, but because it appears so quickly, you can see it's rank, and if it's not number 1 yet, you can tweak the page, see what happens and see if you get to number 1 this time. Wash rinse repeat.So in summary, a blog helps you to optimize your pages and get to the number 1 spot.I hope you enjoyed this article, best of luck in your RSS and blogging efforts.

About the Author
Stephen Warren is the creator of http://www.makeagreatsite.com Learn how to make a great site and turn it into a money making machine in no time.