What is a Blog?

A blog was intially something that allowed you to share your thoughts with other people, and consisted of entries or posts that appeared in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing first.  

Today, the term “blog” is often associated with online diaries and commentary on anything from politics to sports. The term itself is an abbreviation of “weblog” – which started in the late 1990s and was basically the practice of writing down your thoughts and storing them up on a website.    

Unfortunately, the term has many negative connotations associated with it and doesn’t really tell us what it is. Blogging or the act of making a blog is essentially the creation of content for a website.  It wasn’t until the appearance of WordPress in 2003 that a blog could be posted and automatically stored in a database (MySQL).  This transformed a blog into a Content Management System (CMS) that could be accessed by anyone from anywhere is the world with a password. It made the torturous process of creating “structured content” look easy and, best of all, it made it possible to share that content with other platforms, i.e.,  blogging directories.

Because of some of the negative connotations surrounding the term “blog”, I refer to it as posting engine which is the centerpiece of The Digital Marketing System.  The purpose of the posting engine  is twofold:  1) pulls visitors from a search engine to your website by automatically creating structured content, and 2) it allows you to push content up onto another platform, i.e., social media where it can be shared with others.

If you use the Twenty Seventeen Theme, it also allows you to add content to your home page making that page dynamic and fresh – another search engine friendly feature.