What is Blogging: The Ultimate Guide 2023
Do you know what is Blogging? Well, in simple words, blogging is the practice of sharing content on a blog website or a page created to share content. This article will guide you through the very details of blogging.
What is a Blog?
Before trying to understand what is blogging, you must first learn about the term “blog”. If you search for the meaning of a blog, Google defines it as a regularly updated website or a webpage that is maintained by an individual or a group to share written content in an informal or conversational tone.
A decade ago, this would have been the most perfect definition, however, the times have changed and so has the meaning of blog. You must have come across several pages or people on Instagram who has a travel blog or a food blog or a fitness blog. Well, there’s not much that you can write on Instagram, then how come these pages and individuals identify themselves as blogs or bloggers?
The answer is, there has been a slight change in the way an audience perceives a blog online. To the audience using internet browsing and surfing through search engines and social media, a blog continues to be the practice of sharing content on a specific niche or a theme, however, they no longer limit the mode of blogging to just writing or text, rather they have accepted broader and diverse aspects such as photos, videos and audio as well.
So, to be able to understand what is a blog and what is blogging completely, you need to learn about each and every aspect of a blog and the different modes in which content can be shared on a blog. In this article, we’re going to touch on all those aspects of blogging and explore them more in-depth about the topic.
Do you know how to start a blog? Read about the complete details and process of how to start a blog here.
Now that we’re aware of what a blog is, we can now move on to explore more about the practice of blogging. Since we know a blog is simply a page or a website where you may create content in a slightly informal way relating with the audience and connecting with them, then finding the answer to what is blogging isn’t very difficult. Blogging is simply the practice of developing content for a blog page or just any website.
How to Get Started with Blogging
In brief, it can be said that to get started with blogging you’ll have to do a little bit of research to find the niche you’ll enjoy writing about. This will also help you have a good understanding of the target audience and gives an idea about how much it will cost.
All one needs to do is check about what all kinds of content are supported by different kinds of social media platforms. So, to be able to understand what is blogging and how to get started with it, one also needs to have a deep understanding of various formats of blogging or content creation.
So, without further ado, let’s read more about the various formats of content creation and blogging.
Formats of Blogging
Decades ago, when we didn’t have platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms like that, blogging was limited to just text-based content. Blogging was considered as the practice of writing articles of undefined lengths usually in an informal tone.
If we pay little attention to the origin of blogging, it was meant for sharing personal views, opinions, experiences, and more. Later, as blogging became more of commercial practice, companies and organizations started blogging about their products, services, and more to reach a bigger audience.
As blogging culture started to evolve and the people consuming blogs were increasing rapidly, advertising became one of the main ways of monetizing content. Bloggers could use advertising mediums like AdSense, MediaVine, Media.net, and more to run ads on their blogs to generate revenue from their blog.
However, blogging kept evolving and was no longer limited to text-based content on websites, rather the social media revolution redefined how we see blogging. Interestingly, no format of blogging went outdated and all of them continue to be practiced with little changes that came along as we progressed with the internet.
Let’s try and learn about the different formats of blogging and how to make the best use of each format to scale the success of your blog:
There are mainly 5 formats of blogging, they are:
- Text
- Audio
- Video
- Photo
Let’s explore each one of these formats and learn how is it possible for a beginner trying to learn what is blogging and the very detailed aspects of it to start and scale a blog in any of these formats.
Text
Text-based blogging is the oldest and most popular way of blogging. In fact, to date, many people identify blogging as the process of writing articles on a web page. According to a report, there are over 600 million blogs and more than 1.5 billion websites in the world. There is a huge amount of blog content uploaded on web pages and blog sites on a daily basis. The same report suggests that bloggers account for 6 million daily blog posts that sum up to a total of 2.5 billion blog posts annually.
Text blogging is the most famous way of practicing blog writing and one may still consider it as a good option if they aspire to start and scale a blog. To be able to scale a blog, there are certain elements that you need to work on. It’s not like you create a blog and it miraculously grabs audience attention and traffic in thousands.
- How to Grow Your Blog Site?
There are several factors that one needs to consider and pay importance to in order to try and scale a blog website. So, if you wish to learn what is blogging and the detailed aspects of it, then you must first understand how your blog can reach more people.
SEO
There are actually several ways to make your blog reach a certain set of targeted audiences and one of the key ways to do that is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing the article with the help of keywords, title tags, images, links, and more that can help search engines to identify and rank content when users make a search on such platforms.
SEO involves several practices that can help a blogger get good traffic and reach for their blog. This could better be understood with an example. Let’s suppose you write an article about mobile phones, well, a person who wishes to buy one will actually go on google and make a search for “best gaming mobile phones”, so you’ll have to include this keyword along with several outbound and inbound links to be able to rank on Google.
The articles that appear on the first page of Google have a higher chance of getting traffic and the ones ranking at the top 3 have the highest chance of grabbing the biggest share of audience attention. So, search engine optimization or SEO is one of the key ways to get traffic organically.
Social Media
Social media is one of the strongest sources of getting traffic. However, you’ll have to develop content, especially for your social media audience to engage and grow so that you may then share links redirecting to your blog channeling your social media audience towards your website.
You must have seen the swipe-up link feature on Instagram, or you may also directly share the link on the Facebook page or Twitter and ask your audience to follow up with the article. Social media platforms are crowded with billions of daily active users and the organic reach of social media is slightly better than that of search engines because of the way the platforms function.
This is the reason it becomes a little easy to get the audience on social media as compared to getting traffic through search engines.
Audio Blog
Have you heard of an audio blog before? You must have heard of it, if not, let us explain what exactly it means. It has not been very long ever since the concept of an audio blog came into existence, but the popularity of such audio shows and blogs has grown immensely.
In recent years, podcasts have been on an extraordinary rise and have helped incredibly with brand building and more. An audio blog is nothing but an audio show just like radio shows and segments. As the name suggests very clearly, an audio blog or show is entirely in audio format which the audience will usually be able to access to several platforms explicitly allowing only audio content such as music, podcasts, and more.
- How an Audio blog can help you grow your brand
Podcasts and Audio Originals
Like we just mentioned, the rise of podcasts and audio shows has been very evident. This is mainly because of rising of platforms that support such content. There are some massively popular platforms such as Spotify, breaker, google podcasts, apple podcasts, and many more that allow you to create, publish and distribute your podcast.
Another way to get the audience’s attention is through audio shows hosted on specific platforms. Such shows are created in collaboration with the platform and are limited to that specific app or platform only. These are often called Audio Originals. A great example of how popular the audio originals are can be the Spotify $100 Million deal with Joe Rogan.
If you don’t know already, Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters who has been actively running one of the most popular podcasts of all time called “The Joe Rogan Experience”. So, Spotify signed a $100 million deal with Joe Rogan in which he was required to shift his entire content from YouTube to Spotify and continue producing content exclusively on the platform.
This was because Rogan’s podcast gathered hundreds of millions of daily downloads and listens. After this deal, the market valuation of Spotify rocketed through the roof and the app managed to find millions of new subscribers for itself.
This is merely one example that shows the power of podcasts and audio shows, and there are several other examples that show why having an audio blog could be one of the best ways to grab audience attention and grow a brand. One of the very evident reasons for such outrageous growth of podcasts and audio shows is that one cannot watch a video while driving, at the gym, or during jogging, or even cooking, but everyone can listen to audio shows and podcasts which makes it a very popular pass time for people.
Do you know how to start a podcast? Read this complete guide to starting a podcast here
The statistics suggest that the number of podcast creators and listeners has been increasing and if you’re someone who believes you can share value through your content, then you must definitely consider creating an audio blog or a podcast show to grow your brand.
Video Blog or Vlogs
Exactly as the name suggests, a video blog or vlog is basically a page or a channel that provides content in video format around a specific niche, theme, or genre. Video consumption has increased tremendously, and the rise of video content in pretty much all the platforms is very evident. With the internet revolution and progress that has happened in the last couple of years, video content consumption has increased exponentially, making it a very potential medium to grow a brand.
Just like it has already been mentioned, blogs were earlier meant to be content that provided insights about the personal views, opinions, observations of the author, however, with time as blogs became more commercial, people started providing informative and generalized content.
The same goes for video blogs or vlogs. The culture of lifestyle blogs where influencers showcase a part of their life that might appear interesting to the audience continues to be a very popular format of vlogging. There are also informative videos that gather good audience attention.
- What are the platforms to do video blogging?
There are several interesting ways of growing a video blog or a brand through video content. Nowadays, looking at the wildly growing consumption of video content, all social media platforms have introduced video features. You can make the best use of such platforms to promote your page, channel, or blog. YouTube remains one of the best platforms for video creators to start and grow a video blog otherwise called a YouTube Channel.
If you manage to bring good audience attention through your videos, then there are several monetary benefits that you can enable and enjoy. Other than just Youtube, there are several other platforms, in fact, it wouldn’t be wrong at all to say pretty much every platform offers video uploading features starting from Facebook, to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
As of now, the most popular form of video is micro or short video content, which came into a trend because of apps like Musically, Tik Tok and was then adopted by other platforms in the form of Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and more. The organic reach of such content is amazing and therefore, making the best use of such features can help you make your brand popular and gain good attention.
Photo Blog
Pictures say a lot of things and details that might be difficult to explain in words. Photography too is a very big industry and the community that consumes photography content consistently is also as big which is the reason there are several platforms where one can run a photoblog.
Pictures do influence people and they can be practically seen everywhere. Whether it is about fashion, lifestyle, travel, cooking, or anything else, one can always have great pictures to describe a message or a motive. There are several photoblogs actively run by fashion influencers, photojournalists, travel bloggers, and many other people which can be a good example of the fact that photo blogs do exist and are really popular if managed and maintained properly.
These were some interesting information about different types and formats of blogging and how you can use them to grow your brand of getting good audience attention.
- Platforms for photo blogging
Photo blogging has turned out to be one of the finest blogging methods and continues to be one of the most popular forms of content consumed. At this point in time, you can easily find several photo blogging platforms that one may use to generate audience engagement.
One of the very interesting platforms which became wildly popular too soon, and continues to be one of the biggest platforms out there is Instagram. Now owned by Facebook, this app caters to millions or even billions of daily active users.
However, Instagram is no longer just limited to just photos, although it started as a photo blogging platform only meant for photographers, however, soon it found a spot among the most loved and used apps by the general audience on a regular basis which warranted more features that helps bloggers to run a page gaining audience and engagement.
Another platform that supports the concept of photo blogging and hasn’t changed much like Instagram is Pinterest. Over the years, Pinterest has continued to be one of the most loved photos blogging platforms for not one but several reasons.
One of the key highlights of this platform is that it allows the uploader to link the pictures to their blog which means the image viewer can then click on the pic to be redirected to the blog site. Another feature of this platform is that it filters content based on user’s interests and thus there is no race or competition for rankings as such.
And there are a couple of more apps and platforms that are sort of a replica of Instagram and Pinterest, however, these two continue to rule the photo blogging platforms.
How to Earn From Blogging
This is one of the most asked questions when it comes to blogging. Most of the people who aspire to learn what is blogging and every detail about it always show their curiosity to know about the scope of earning as a blogger. It is a very important question indeed for all the aspiring bloggers out there.
Given there is a way to make good money in blogging, people who enjoy writing passionately would invest their time and energy into being consistent at writing articles and keeping their blog running. Well, there is definitely good scope of earning in blogging, however, it does come with certain conditions which one has to keep in mind to be able to scale it big through blogging.
First of all, you need to understand, how and why are bloggers paid. There are primarily 4 ways in which bloggers can earn, they are:
- Advertisements
- Sponsorships
- Affiliate Commissions
Let’s try and explore each one of these ways to make money through a blog and understand them in absolute detail. May it be sponsorships, advertisements, or Affiliate Commission, always remember that bloggers get pain for two things, they are:
- Reach
- Sales
Let’s suppose you have a blog around fitness, once the blog reaches massive audiences, brands will approach you and sponsor your content for increased visibility. When you write or feature the sponsored content, people read it and thus your blog helps brands to build reach which will later translate into more customers and sales for the brand. The same goes for other ways of making money through a blog, so let’s dig deeper into each one of the mentioned methods of monetizing a blog.
Advertisement
Ads or advertisements have always remained one of the best and most popular ways to make money through a blog. This happens in a very organized and systematic way through several advertising services such as Adsense, Mediavine, and more.
These services have registered advertisers spending money to advertise their brands through banner ads, pop-ups, and more. So, when you sign up for one of these advertising services as a blog, based on your niche and traffic, these services take a little space on your blog to run ads for relevant advertisers and you get paid.
The payment isn’t always huge and easy and you must understand how it works exactly. The payment structure by every platform is different. The earning is basically for two elements that are impressions and clicks. The payout for impressions is less as compared to the payouts for clicks as clicks eventually redirect the user to the seller’s page.
Depending on the niche, and the advertiser, the payouts can differ. For example, generally, the cost per click for fitness, health, or technology ads is more as compared to other ads, so getting few clicks in the fitness domain is way more valuable than getting many clicks on any other genre.
Some of the top advertising services out there are:
- Media.net
- Mediavine
- AdThrive
- Propeller Ads
- Ezoic
These are only some of all the advertising networks and there are definitely many more which you can easily look for and find on the web. You must first go through the terms and conditions and eligibility criteria to understand how to get your blog approved for running ads through any specific platform.
Sponsorships
The next way of earning money through a blog is sponsorships. It is also one of the very popular and known ways of generating revenue through a blog. Just like it has already been mentioned, sponsorships are a way of increasing brand visibility. Blogs that gather tens or even hundreds of thousands of audiences have a higher chance of getting sponsors.
How it usually works is let’s suppose you have a blog around traveling which is really popular, so the chances are companies that operate in the travel industry will approach you for collaborations and sponsored content which will further lead to increased awareness about the brand.
Sponsorships are definitely a great way of generating revenue from blogs however one of the demerits of this structure of generating revenue is that it isn’t always uniform and certain meaning you cannot always be sure about getting clients. Although consistently well-performing websites manage to find sponsors, it is very much possible that you have a well-performing website or blog and you still do not get sponsors.
While advertisements are more structured and performance-based, sponsorships are quite uncertain in that matter. It might happen that you get a lot of sponsors in a month and no sponsors at all in the next month. Keeping all the mentioned points in mind, it is undeniably correct that if you know how to bag sponsors, you can actually make a good chunk of money from your blog entirely through sponsorships.
That was little from a lot about the model of generating revenue through sponsorships while trying to scale a blog successfully.
Affiliate
The last and again one of the most effective ways of generating income through blogging is through affiliate commissions. To understand the revenue generation process by becoming an affiliate, you must first understand what an affiliate is.
So, an affiliate is someone who brings traffics, or in other words potential leads and sales to the seller. This could be better explained with the help of an example. Let’s suppose you have set up a gym which isn’t very popular, although you’ve invested heavily into equipment, you are unable to reach and convince people to join your gym.
In such a scenario, you may find people who can influence other people through their respective channels to direct their attention towards your gym. This might possibly help you increase your lead count and sales as well. So, you might approach a nutritionist and offer him a commission every time someone joins the gym acting upon the nutritionist’s suggestion or advice.
This basically the structure of an affiliate. So, brands that do not have that huge of an audience or those who have invested heavily into creating the product or service while forgot the marketing part entirely, need a source that can drive the audience towards their product or service.
If you actively run a blog that grabs good audience attention, then chances are when you post a link or a banner, some part of your audience with follow up with that link and get redirected to the seller’s website where they might end up purchasing the product which will earn you a commission since you had a role in making the sale happen.
There are platforms that can track the entire process of your blog visitor clicking the link to making the purchase and thus will reward you accordingly. So, this is basically how affiliate marketing works and how affiliate marketers generate revenue through their blogs.
The above mentioned were the 3 most amazing, authentic, and popular ways in which anyone can generate revenue through a blog. If you’re someone who whats to learn what is blogging and what are the ways to generate revenue out of a blog, then you must keep in mind these 3 base revenue-generating models for a blogging business.
Affiliate marketing is a considerable way of making money provided you understand how it is done. Read about how to get started with affiliate marketing here
Is Blogging Saturated?
After consuming so much information about blogging, it must appear to you that blogging might be an overtly crowded industry. The stats definitely suggest that there are a few billion blogs and the number of articles uploaded on the blogs on an everyday basis is also in the millions. So, among such a highly practiced craft, how is it possible for someone to scale their blog online?
More importantly, when we perform any kind of search on Google, the first page contains 10 results and people barely go to the second page. In fact, the articles ranking at 5th or 6th also don’t get attention close to what the 1st or 2nd link gathers. So, this might also make you feel like when millions of people are blogging, what are your chances of making it to the first page?
The answer to all such questions is a big NO! The blogging industry is not saturated at all and continues to have enough space to welcome millions of new blogs and bloggers. There are good reasons supporting the statement. First of all, the millions of blogs existing on the web aren’t directly competing with you, meaning, let’s say you have a fitness blog then you’re only in competition with other fitness blogs and not others like automobile, travel, food, etc which account for a majority among the millions of blogs.
Once you realize, you’re only competing in your niche and there are far fewer blogs in any particular niche as compared to the total number of blogs. Well, you might feel that competing in a specific niche even though it is very small for 10 slots on the first page of search results is still difficult. That is absolutely correct, which is why here’s another angle to it that might give you a little confidence about blogging.
The algorithm of search engines like Google keeps ranking different content for different locations, meaning what ranks in your city or state might not be the exact order in other states. So, even if you’re not ranking in your locality, mobile, or laptop browser, you might be ranking in some other city or state bringing you some amount of traffic.
So, if you’re trying to understand what is blogging and if it is already saturated to start with then you must keep in mind that the blogging industry has plenty of space for new bloggers to try and grow.
Bonus Tip: You needn’t necessarily chase rankings on the search engine results page on Google all the time, rather there are several other ways to bring traffic to your blog making it popular enough to activate your monetizing sources. Just like it has been mentioned already there are different formats of blogging such as through social media, video, photo, and even audio content, making the best use of such formats can help your blog perform really well. Let’s say one of your articles didn’t make it to the Google search results on the first page, so you may just post the same link on social media with some interesting caption that can redirect a good number of people towards your blog.
That was it about you learning what is blogging if it is a saturated industry or not.
Summary
There are also countless stories that suggest how blogging has helped several people make money. This is one of the very feasible ways of generating revenue. Through this article, we got to cover some really important aspects of blogging. Let’s take a brief tour of this article and highlight some of the really important points.
Blogging is basically the practice of creating content for a website, web page, or even a social media page. Earlier, blogging as a practice was limited to text-based content, however with the evolution of the internet, it has shifted towards the photo, video, and audio blogging as well.
There are several ways to generate an income out of a blog. The primary ways of doing so are through 3 ways they are affiliate commissions, sponsorships, and advertisements. For those wondering if there is good scope to make money through blogging, the answer is yes. The blogging industry possesses immense potential and can be very fruitful and rewarding for those who know how to practice the craft and do it properly.
Looking at the stats and facts, it might look like the blogging industry is very saturated while the truth is that the industry has plenty of space to welcome new bloggers.
If you wish to learn blogging from scratch that includes the process of creating a blogging site, designing it, creating content on it, and then making revenue out of it, you may consider going for the IIM SKILLS content writing course. This course is one of the best content writing courses out there, and you may try attending one of their free online live demo sessions on their website.
You can also read the reviews of the IIM SKILLS content writing course of several platforms to get an idea about the course.
So that was it about what is blogging and every other detail around it. For beginners, a concluding statement could be, ” Blogging is a massively opportunistic industry and can be a very rewarding career if practiced properly.”
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