A blog  is a regularly updated journal published on the Internet.  A typical blog includes content, images and links to other blogs or websites.  Peter Merholz first used the word ‘blog’ in 1999.  By 2006 Technorati, a blog and social media tracking engine, reported that a new blog was being created somewhere in the world every second of the day.  Technorati have subsequently reported that 175,000 blogs are created each day, while some 1.6 million post updates are published each day (one every 18 seconds). 

Blogs can be stand-alone ‘websites’, or a component of a content management system (CMS) that is not necessarily on the homepage of the CMS.  eZenith serves clients by hosting, setting up and designing blogs – and teaching our clients how to blog (if necessary).  eZenith’s preferred publishing platform for blogs is WordPress, whether for a stand-alone blog, or for a complex CMS with a blog as a component of the site.  It is essential to plan a blog carefully – and to have a very good reason for starting the blog - since 55% of blogs do not last longer than the first three months (source: Sifry, 2006).  These bloggers run out of time, enthusiasm or content (or all three).

Blogs are excellent tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Because they are updated regularly, the search engine  ’spiders’ that ‘crawl’ the web in order to index websites visit these blogs more regularly than websites that are static (in terms of content).  There are various mechanisms to monetize blogs, such as an affiliate marketing programme (e.g. Amazon affiliates) or PPC advertisements (such as Google’s PPC publishers’ platform, AdSense).