The term Blog evolves from another term called “Web Log”. Blogging is a famous concept over the Internet where people maintain a website to write and update posts or articles. These articles could be personal, business oriented, news, reviews, etc. A person who writes a blog is called “Blogger”.

The beginning of blogging dates back to 1995. The foremost purpose of blogging was to share one’s thought, happenings, and news with people over the world. But as time passed, blogging entered into a larger and a more interesting realm. People started setting up blogs to write about personal life, companies blog about their business, product houses write reviews, media corporations publish daily news, and so on.

Blogging Software

With the availability of multiple blogging software, both commercial and open source, setting up a blog has never been easier. These blogging software allow 1-click installation and offers a comprehensive dashboard to manage and publish blog posts. They are also known as Content Management Systems.

Few of these software (aka CMSs) are:

  1. WordPress
  2. Joomla
  3. Drupal
  4. Movable Type
  5. TypePad
  6. Expression Engine

Blogging software have evolved to a stage where they not only facilitate publishing of articles or blog posts, but also bundle a plethora of other functional modules for all business domains. At present, WordPress leads the band with around 60+ million websites on the Internet powered by WordPress.

Blogging Services

An alternative to blogging software, which require a web host and installation, are ready made blogging services. They only require a quick registration, as part of which you can choose your blog’s name and theme, so you can start blogging within minutes. Here are a few popular blogging services:

  1. Google Blogger
  2. WordPress.com
  3. Blog.com
  4. Blogetery.com
  5. LiveJournal.com
  6. Tumblr.com
  7. Weebly.com
  8. Jux.com

Types of Blogging

Blogging as a methodology has taken multiple forms and shapes. Few of which are:

  1. Micro Blogging: This method is used to publish short messages or tiny blog posts, which are normally focused on a specific point. Twitter is a widely used micro-blogging platform.
  2. Personal Blogging: This approach is usually adopted by individuals who like to share things and news happening in their personal lives. Individual may share daily events, family pictures, birthday parties, etc. It is basically kind of keeping an online diary.
  3. Photo Blogging: This method involves publishing only pictures and images, no textual content is written. It is commonly used by media houses or commercial photographers.
  4. Video Blogging: This method again involves publishing of only videos, no textual content or images are added.
  5. Business Blogging: Blogs created by companies are normally business oriented where personnel’s from companies write about happenings, news, services, product reviews on the blogs.

Blogs can be single-authored and multi-authored. Single-authored blogs are mostly personal blogs written solely by one individual. Multi-authored blogs is generally a collective effort of multiple people and bloggers.

Making Money by Blogging

With the advent of SEO and advertising, blogging has become a lucrative medium to earn money over the Internet. With this business model, the number of bloggers have risen tremendously over the last few years.

The general process is:

  1. Buy a niche domain and hosting.
  2. Setup a blog.
  3. Write articles, reviews, tutorials, opinions, etc.
  4. Use SEO techniques for better rankings in the search engines. This helps give good amount of traffic.
  5. Place ads on the blog using ad publishing networks like Google Adsense, ClickBank, Kontera or BuySellAds.
  6. When readers visit your blog, they see the ads. You earn money if they click on these ads.