Whenever I present a seminar at the local business centre, one of the first questions I’m asked are what a blog is. Such questions are commonly asked by new business owners who are not as web savvy as they’d like to be. After all, they are experts in their own industries, not in blogging or Internet content dissemination systems in general.

I received a few email messages from friends this morning, after I told them about a new blog launch. To answer such a question, I could dive into the technical aspects (I’m a certified Network Engineer MCSE among others), as much as the practical aspects (that would perhaps, make more sense to the business owner).

While googling does provide a lot of definitions, I’m not really sure that they grasp the meat and potatoes of blogging. To define a blog in its simplest terms:

A blog empowers a business to reach a wider audience and continue a conversation with them, by providing readers with in demand, quality, syndicated content. Blogs are beneficial in that they allow business owners to add content to their blogs as needed, without requiring the services of a web site developer or designer (to update the content). Therefore two evident benefits, are that blogs save business owners money and help market products or services.

Blogs are a way to continue a conversation with the audience. This is accomplished by the use of features, just some such of which include:

• Readers providing comments and feedback.
• Surveys and Polls.
• Content written by and submitted for posting by guest writers from the audience.

In terms of features, many of them are beneficial. For example, blogs provide RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. What’s an RSS feed and why is it beneficial? Wikipedia has a great blurb.

From wikipedia:

…Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based or desktop-based…

In other words, when we update the content in our blog, subscribers (of our RSS feed) are instantly notified!

One (initially) less visible benefit of blogging comes into play as the volume of quality content grows. The greater the amount of quality content available, the greater the amount of traffic (visitors) to the blog. Therefore, over time, a blog can become an increasingly powerful tool for the business owner!

To further clarify, I visited YouTube and searched for “What is a blog”. The first and best result returned was a great video from “CommonCraft”, titled “Blogs in Plain English”:

I should add that they also have a great video explaining RSS in Plain English.

Another video describing different types of blogs may also further explain some of the diversity in blogging:

In conclusion, it’s not a far stretch to realize that maintaining a conversation with your audience is the best way not only to grow traffic to your quality, in demand content, but also an incredibly effective way to promote products, services, charities, hobbies… in fact an endless list!