What defines a blog? A blog has two very important characteristics:

1. It offers the possibility to quickly and easily create and publish your content
2. Has a mechanism that allow readers to leave comments or another form of feedback

If you miss any of the above you do not have a blog. For sure you can argue that Seth Godin for example, does not accept comments. You are right but he accepts trackbacks which is a form of feedback.

Coming back to conversations or content discussion we can see that a blog has both. It has content created and published usually by the owner and it has the feedback mechanisms that spark the conversations. And that’s why blogging got so much traction. In 2008 13% of the US population was maintaining a blog. This will increase to 17% form the US population by 2013. The readers of blogs represented in 2008 45% of the US population and they will increase to 58% by 2013. This means that by 2013 128 million people in the US will read blogs while 38 million will blog.

When you start blogging the first thing you have to decide is what to blog about. If you are blogging for business you should ask yourself who are your customers and then figure out what are they interested about. Statistics show that you will find your blogging “voice” and you’ll figure out how to blog after creating the first 30 posts.

By now you should have a lot of questions: How to blog? Is blogging for me? What platform to use? What should I write about? What layout should my blog have? What theme should I choose? What domain name? Most of these questions will be answered in the first class of Inbound Marketing University that you can watch below. Learn how to blog, enjoy and if you have more questions or comments, post them below.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

Photo credits by Courtney Bolton