To Blog or not to Blog
When you are thinking of creating an online presence as a business or a hobby, should you set up a website for yourself or a blog or both?
A weblog, mostly known as a blog, is usually described as an online diary, written in reverse chronlogical order but with the most recent entry displayed first.
Nowadays the blog has evolved into the ultimate promotion tool whether you're promoting your products or promoting yourself.
I decided to set up a blog rather than a website to record my research into creating a website firstly because I am not an authority on the subject.
2) I wanted to chronicle it as a beginner who is investigating, researching and gathering information and knowledge.
3) Because in the world of the Internet, everything changes with a click of the mouse, and it would be easier for me to record the latest developments and changes through a blog than the comparatively static medium of a website.
4) I wanted to experiment with blog monetization. (This blog was originally born in WordPress.com but when I found that I wouldn't be able to monetise the blog in WordPress, I decided to abscond to Blogger. There are some who believe that monetising a blog goes against the spirit of blogging. But this is an experiment. Well, that's my excuse anyway.)
5) Sheer laziness: it is dead easy to set up a blog and can be done for free.
The three blog services I've heard of are Blogger (obviously), Wordpress and Typepad.
On Wordpress.com, you can set up a blog for free just as with Blogger. With Wordpress.org, you can own your blog, monetize your blog and set it up on your own web host. Both versions of Wordpress are free.
Typepad is suited for business or professional blogging purposes and has a monthly fee ranging from $4.95 to $29.95 depending on which level you choose.
This is not my first blog. I have a self-help blog which is set out in a traditional sort of blog format with archives and a facility for visitors to add comments, if I choose.
I also have a blog on my main website which I don't manually have much to do with. My web host Site Build It arranges all the new pages I create for my website in chronological order into a bloglike format. Don't ask me how. But it is a very handy tool to have - even though, in my opinion, it isn't strictly a blog.
I particularly like this description of what a blog is NOT .
On the other hand, because of the individual nature of blogging, a blog can be anything you want it to be. I remember the slogan I once read on the Hollywood Offender Blog: where the only opinion that matters is MINE.
