What is Blogging?
Let’s start by defining blogging by explaining the meaning of blog. In the early internet time, the term blog was known as web log. In simple term it means record of things kept on the web. It means log in web format, hence web log. Along the way, the term gets shortened to blog. So, what is blogging? It is an act of creating post for and maintaining the blog. Blogging is just like keeping a diary (log) online.
The world of blogging is also called blogosphere. This is referring to the world of blogs with all the contents.
Nowadays many blogs are started everyday. According to Technorati statistics done in 2007, there were about 120,000 blogs created every day. Those were about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. When translated to posts, there were about 1.5 million postings per day, which meant that 17 new posts were created every second then. Compared to mainstream media, blogs are getting more and more popular. In fact, blogs have become alternative for people researching for news, information and data over the internet.
Looking from language perspective, we can see an interesting trend from Sifry’s Alerts written by David Sifry (founder and CEO of Technorati). In 2006, Japanese has taken over English as the most popular language used in the Blogosphere followed by Chinese and Italian at third and fourth place.
How to start blogging? It is very easy to start a blog nowadays. You have a choice of doing it on free blog hosting like blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc. Alternatively, you can also choose to host your blog yourself. For this, you just need to have a domain name and a web hosting. The most popular application for blog self-hosting is wordpress which is included in popular web hosting packages.
Once your blog is up, you can start blogging. You can start writing and posting the posts according to the area you would like to focus on. For business purpose, the blog should contain updates to the business, new offers and even valuable reports for your target markets. For personal, it can contain anything you would like to have and to write.
When you have enough content, you can start to think of monetization for your blog. Monetization means thinking of ways to make money blogging, making money from your blog.
[Added on 7 April 2009]
From the outlook, blogging seems to be very easy to start. However, it really requires strong determination from the blogger. At least for the start, it is recommended to have a minimum of three postings per week. It is better if you can write a quality posting a day. This is the only requirement for the start to be successful. [/add]
I have gone through this path of self-discovery on blogging. It was fun but required much effort and energy until I found out lately about Atomic Blogging version 3.0. It is a complete step-by-step tutorial guide on creating profitable blog. It is suitable for beginner and intermediate bloggers to start profitable blogging. It includes eBook, search-engine-optimized templates and useful plugins. I like everything with exception of one thing. I realized English is not Alvin Phang’s first language and I found out there are just too many things I would need to edit and correct if I were the editor of the eBook. 
You can watch a short video clips on the Atomic Blogging version 3.0 below.
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