A blog is a regularly updated website where new content is frequently published, typically written in an informal or conversational style—often with the goal of attracting readers and achieving some blogging goals like growing a business and community-building.
You most likely read blogs every day without even realizing it.
You’re actually on our blog right now.
Major websites like Forbes and CNN are all blogs too.
But before we continue, if you’re looking for a top-notch blog dedicated to content marketing, we highly recommend ContentMarketing.
ContentMarketing is one of the best resource sites dedicated to content marketing and related topics, including digital marketing, blogging, SEO, email marketing, website building and affiliate marketing
We offer easy to follow step by step guides, tutorials and software advice to help you jump-start and grow your online business, learn how to make money online, and be a successful entrepreneur. We are 100% supported by our readers (YOU).
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links on our blog are affiliate links (e.g. Bluehost). If you click on those affiliate links and purchase the products, we may earn a commission. It comes at no extra cost to you, but it supports us in running this blog and creating even more useful content free of charge to you.
Let’s get continue.
What is the difference between a blog and a website?
Unless you’ve already started a blog or have held some other type of web-based job, you may not know there’s a big difference between a blog and a website.
All blogs are websites, but not all websites are blogs.
Now, we want to cut through some of the confusion and really nail down on what a blog actually is and how it’s different from making a website. The true blog definition you’re looking for
How is a blog different than a website?
The main difference between a blog and a website, is that a blog is active (dynamically changing as new content is published) and a website is more static without regular updates.
As we covered already, all blogs are websites by definition—but not all websites are blogs.
One of the main differences is that a website is comprised primarily of pages—such as the home page, a services page and contact page.
A website can even be just one single page.
A blog, on the other hand, is comprised of both pages and posts (of which there are usually more posts than pages).
Each post is its own distinct article, most often hosted on the blog page of the greater website.
Put simply, a blog is designed around the principle of releasing regular new types of content and your typical blog layouts reflect that focus—while websites are more static and don’t usually change with regularity.
With a website, they’re generally built, published and more or less just sit there.
Unless the business needs to update the website in order to do something like add new services or change their address, these static websites that aren’t as central to driving a significant amount of business remain relatively the same for long periods of time.
Blogs are very fluid web properties (which mean you need to choose one of the best web hosting plans to get your blog online).
Blogs are updated and changed on a regular basis with new and relevant content.
When you publish a new blog post, that most recent article often shows up in reverse chronological order, like here on our blog.
This way, your readers get your most recent content first.
That being said, there are many ways to organize your blog in order to guide your audience toward what you want them to read.
Is it better to have a blog or a website?
Disclaimer: We’re a little biased when it comes to blogging.
We feel that blogging is better than having a static website—in most situations.
Additionally, if you’re considering how much does it cost to blog as opposed to running a static website, the costs are essentially the exact same.
However, it really comes down to the business goals you have, and what your priorities will be with your digital property.
Deciding between a blog or a website for your business? Take these considerations into account.
Remember when we said that websites are made up primarily of pages?
A website that only has pages is usually there to convey very specific information.
That includes things like:
- Your business hours, address or menu
- A freelancer’s portfolio of work
- Your physical (or digital) products that are for sale
- Service offerings you provide and sample projects
Even with one-page websites that have a more marketing-focus, that one page should have a very specific intention too.
Often these are called “squeeze” pages that give something in exchange for the visitor’s email address—to later market a related product or service to them.
What are your business goals?
In order to determine whether a blog or website is better for you, start by determining what your blogging goals are.
- Are you trying to collect email addresses to build your online community? A website with a blog will be a powerful combination.
- Do you have a small local restaurant with the goal of letting people know your menu and hours? A website with a few pages should suffice.
If you have a lot of information to communicate, then a blog is your best option.
Blogging is a great way to not only interact with your existing community, but to attract new potential customers to your website.
What’s the difference between posts and pages?
There are several differences between blog posts and the pages of your website.
Posts:
- Are generally formatted the same based on your website template
- Can be added to an RSS feed
- You can have an unlimited number of posts
- Organized based on tags and categories
- Get the author and date published on a post
- Are active and regularly updated
- Are archived based on month and year
- More likely to be shared on social media
- Have several headings and subheadings
- Encourage conversation through comments
Pages:
- Each page is often formatted somewhat differently
- The number of pages should be relatively limited
- Contain information that doesn’t change often
- They are not tied to specific dates
- Are not written with the intent to be shared on social
- Do not have an author or publish date
- Don’t include comments
- Hierarchical by nature
- Don’t include an RSS feed
When writing a blog post for your website, you’ll have a more in-depth process that begins with keyword research, crafting a blog post outline, strategizing on a blog headline that’ll attract readers and determining the narrative arc of your content all before you even get to putting any content down. Pages are a little different.
Now, let’s talk about the key pages every blog and website should have—regardless of your goals.
Key pages every blog and website should have
Even if you are “just blogging,” there are still several static pages that you should include on your website.
About page
The About Me page tells your visitors what or who your website is about.
Every company with a website—or blog—should include an about page.
This helps your audience not only learn more about you and your brand, but to also make the decision of whether or not you’ll be a good fit for each other.
As a business, you can use your about page to showcase your mission and vision statements.
If you are a blogger, you can use the about page to link to your social media profiles, encourage people to follow you, tell your personal story and provide popular content suggestions.
Contact page
A contact page can be as simple as a contact form plugin like Gravity Forms or WP Forms, where people can reach you for business opportunities.
Or, your contact page can be used to sell your products or services.
As a business, this is a great place to provide your address, email address and phone number.
Whether you’re a business or blogger though, you should make it easy for people to reach out to you.
Privacy policy page
You also need to let your website visitors know that you’re collecting their data.
If you’re collecting email addresses or have analytics on your website, you need to make sure that you have a privacy policy page that spells that all out.
Terms of Service
This page is vital if you sell products, services or promote affiliate offers on your website.
This should be treated as a legal document.
A Terms of Service page helps to limit your liability in the case that services or information from your website is misused.
These are the four main pages that every website should include, no matter what.
Why every website should have a blog
If your website is built on WordPress, then you have the ability to add a blog to your website—and you should!
Why: Blogging gives your website a better chance to attract more visitors.
Let’s do some simple math to illustrate the importance of having more people on your website is a win…
More visitors = more potential customers = more revenue.
You can get more people to visit your website when you increase your traffic through techniques like SEO and blogging.
1. It’s all about traffic and search engine optimization (SEO)
When you first start a blog or launch your website, people don’t just magically flock to read all of your amazing content.
One of the biggest things that new bloggers and website owners get hung up on is how to get traffic to their sites.
Your SEO strategy is what is going to keep bringing you more traffic month after month.
One of the best ways to build a stellar SEO strategy is to have a blog that publishes regular high-quality content for search engines to index and surface to their users.
While there is a bit of a learning curve, we can promise you, anyone can learn SEO.
And in fact, doing so is core to putting together a smart blogging strategy that’ll stand the test of time.
One of the best tips that we can give you here, without going into too much detail on blog SEO strategies, is to focus on keyword research and user-intent.
Think about this for a minute… How did you find this article you’re reading right now?
We’d be willing to bet you typed into Google, something like “what is a blog?” or “what’s the difference between a blog and a website?”
It’s no accident that you landed on this page. You’re here because we did our keyword research, focused on user-intent to create a comprehensive answer to these two main questions and then worked hard to nail our blog SEO strategies.
User-intent, simply put, means that the posts that you write are meant to answer a question or solve a problem that the user has.
You can no longer just write a blog post that contains a bunch of filler content with a string of keywords at the end.
People don’t learn anything from that and major search engines like Google know you’re trying to game the system, so they won’t show that content to their users.
2. The benefits of blogging
There are many benefits to blogging, beyond just getting your ideas out into the world.
Make money
Blogging can be a lucrative venture for businesses of all sizes.
By creating high quality content that is interesting and useful to your target audience, you can attract new customers and drive more traffic to your website.
Whether creating or looking to grow your blog empire, investing in high quality content is key to blogging success.
With the right blogging strategy in place, blogging can provide you with the opportunity to earn a part-time or full-time income.
Creates brand awareness
Blogging can help create brand awareness by exposing your business to a larger audience.
By writing and publishing useful content about your company and products, you can attract new customers and build trust with current ones.
Promote your services or products
Blogging gives you a unique platform to promote your services or products through interactive and value-charged content.
Educates customers
Blogging can offer value to customers by educating them about new products or services.
By writing about topics that are relevant to their customers, businesses can create and publish content that is both informative and entertaining.
This content is valuable because it offers information that people want and need.
Additionally, by providing education, businesses can help their customers make better decisions.
Helps you become an industry expert
By writing useful content about topics related to your business, you can establish yourself and your business as an expert on those topics.
This will build trust and credibility with your target audience, resulting in more leads.
Your blog should be easy to follow and understand, with well-formed explanations in short passages.
Using accurate language and grammar will make your blog look credible, helping to build a base of followers who may eventually turn into customers.
Converts visitors into leads
When a visitor clicks through to a blog post or website that is relevant to them, they may become interested in what the business provides.
Conversion refers to driving a specific action that will result in future revenue.
For example, if you are selling web hosting services online and your conversion goal is to drive traffic to the services, then you are looking for users to purchase your hosting services.
Gives you a free advertising
Effective blogging strategy can economize your costs and increase your brand awareness.
You know the medium through traditional marketing are expensive.
It can push referral marketing
It is a human thing – triggered by positive experiences.
If you please your customers by producing valuable materials, they will talk about it.
That means that you can turn readers to brand advocates.
They will assist you in gaining new visitors and crystalizing your image.
Repurposes content for social media
Repurposing content for social media can be a great way to keep your brand top of mind and connect with your target audience.
By using trending topics, looking for similar brands, and targeting relevant buyer personas, you can create engaging content that will give you increased followers and engagement on social media platforms.
By repurposing existing content for social media, you can save time by not having to create new content from scratch.
It allows you to share the same message across all social media channels without duplicating efforts.
Repurposing content also helps you stay up-to-date with the latest trends in your industry and connects you with other businesses interested in reaching their target audience.
Cultivates an online community and engages with an audience
Blogging is an excellent way to share your information and connect with other people who have similar interests and passions.
By engaging with your target audience and offering high quality and useful content, you can build a strong online community.
This community can provide valuable feedback, leads, and sales.
New content brings life to your website
Your website is a digital breathing entity until you stop updating your content and kill it, and the more you publish new content more regularly the search engines like Google will check your website.
Also, you should take care of your current and keep current and future customers updated.
You don’t need a product or service to get started
Unlike a website that’s centered on an already established business, you can start a blog without an existing product or service today.
While you can certainly add products and services over time as you build up an audience, you don’t need anything other than your blog in order to get started on audience-building.
People often choose a blog name and just start writing content about their passions at first.
Then after they’ve truly found their audience, they can work to develop products or services that resonate with them.
Things their readers will actually want to buy.
You can also start making money from a blog without your own products or services, but more on that in a minute.
How Websites Make Money VS How Blogs Make Money
If you have just a website without a blog there are a few ways that you can generate income from your website.
Most commonly—from selling the physical or digital products and services you already have to your existing customer base and hoping more people discover your website from either organic searches or paid advertising campaigns with search engines and social networks.
A blog, on the other hand, can make money in many ways—including the above methods… while also building you that audience of potential customers along the way.
While there are many ways to make money blogging, here are the five most ways to monetize your blog:
- Advertisements
- Sponsored opportunities
- Selling services
- Affiliate programs
- Physical and digital products
Advertisements
Ads are one of the most common ways bloggers start making money relatively early on.
There is a very low barrier to entry and you don’t need a ton of traffic to generate some income —very small until you’re driving a hundreds of thousands of monthly readers.
That being said, if you get a lot of traffic and are part of a strong ad network, you can make good money doing little else but publishing new blog content.
Sponsored opportunities
Sponsorships are when a blogger collaborates with another company to promote their products or services.
Although it can take some time to get sponsored opportunities, as sponsors want an ROI from their investment, so they like to see reasonable traffic and engagement stats of your readers before diving in.
Selling services
Services can be classified as anything from selling your work as a freelancer to all the way to coaching people through the same career path you has built for yourself.
Put simply though, this is where you’re trading hours for dollars—so it’s not the most sustainable way to build a large business from your blog in the long run.
However, it can also be very lucrative, especially if you build up a raving fan base and people are banging down your door to work with you.
That can justify charging a premium.
Affiliate programs
Another very easy to get started with making money on your blog, is through affiliate programs.
There are affiliate programs for literally every blog niche out there that you can think of—from WordPress plugins to web hosting services.
The basic principle of affiliate marketing is that you simply place a link in your blog posts referencing a product and when people purchase through your link, you earn a commission at no extra cost to them.
Most affiliate programs have a low barrier to entry, and you often don’t need a ton of traffic in order to get started either.
But generally speaking, the more traffic you have to your blog posts, the more affiliate sales you’ll be likely to generate.
Physical and digital products
Products, both physical and digital, are also smart options to make money with through your blog.
Digital products are a lot easier to get started with as you can make them yourself (such as an online blogging course or writing an eBook) and market it to the readers on your blog.
Physical products take a little more time and money to create brand new.
However, you can start with dropshipping, which is where you launch an online store (from a new page on your blog) and you don’t have to keep any actual inventory yourself.
You can also work with a wholesaler to develop your own brand using white label products where you just put your branding on their product.
What’ll it be?
Do you want to start a blog or create a website?
Do you already have a business that needs more exposure… or do you want to build a new business by sharing your thoughts with the world?
Either way, blogging can significantly help further your goals.
Common Types of Blogs
Now that you have learned the definition of a blog and a website, the difference between a blog and a website, history of blogging and how blogs makes money, let’s discuss the seven common types of blogs.
- Niche blogs: These types of blogs offer information on a specific topic or niche, usually related to the blogger’s passions, skills, and knowledge. Examples of this blog type include beauty blogs, travel blogs, lifestyle blogs etc.
- Affiliate blogs: These types of blogs are based on affiliate marketing – the practice of promoting a third party’s products and services. Bloggers and affiliate marketers will receive a commission when someone purchases from their custom links. Typical articles on these blogs include product reviews and “best-of” listicles.
- Multimedia blogs: They use a blog format but publish multimedia content, like videos and podcasts, instead of written blog posts. They also usually include the video or podcast’s summary, table of contents, and essential quotes.
- Group blogs: Multiple authors create blog posts on related topics and the blog owner is the one who proofreads and posts blog content.
- Personal blogs: These types of blogs usually work like online diaries where the bloggers shares opinions, often not aiming to reach a target audience or sell an item. Personal blogs can discuss various subjects, from family events and self-reflection to work projects.
- News blogs: Content on these blogs focuses on the latest happenings and new releases in a specific industry. Unlike other blogs, news blogs generally do not usually include opinions or personal content.
- Business blogs: Its primary purpose is publishing content relevant to a company’s industry or updating the target audience regarding any changes within its business. It may be a section on a company website or an independent website.
Ready to Start a Profitable Blog Today?
The next stage, now that you know what’s a blog and the best types of blogs that earns money, is to make your blog and start money blogging.
In summary, here is how to make a blog ready to attract traffic, leads, and sales:
Step #1: The first step is simple. Just click here to go to Bluehost homepage and click “Get Started Now” button. (We also use Bluehost)
Step #2: From here, scan the menu and select “Hosting” at the top of the screen.
The hosting menu will expand and present you with three different website hosting options:
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- VPS Hosting
Shared hosting is the perfect choice for people building a new website.
So go ahead and select that from the expanded drop-down menu.
Since you’re setting up a new blog, the Basic plan starting at $2.95 per month should be fine for you.
The extra features that come with this hosting plan will cover all of the fundamental needs of your site’s functioning.
Once your blog takes off and starts receiving heavier traffic, you can easily upgrade to a Plus or Choice Plus plan, which offers advanced features better suited to handle a greater inflow of traffic.
To continue, just click the “Select” button under the pricing plan that suits you best.
Step #3: Enter the domain name you want to use.
Step #4: Enter your account information.
Step #5: Under package information, choose an account based on how long you want to pay. (Note: There’s a 30 day money back guarantee with all plans, so there’s no risk)
Step #6: Uncheck the package extras.
Step #7: Complete your purchase, choose your strong password and log in to your Bluehost account.
Step #8: Answer the onboarding questions or skip them, but choose “business” when prompted.
Step #9: Click “skip” when it comes to choosing your theme.
Step #10: From the Bluehost dashboard, click the WordPress button on the right, and you’ll end on WordPress.
Congratulations! You now have a self-hosted WordPress blog.
What is a Blog? FAQs
What Is Blogging?
Blogging is the process of creating a blog or website and sharing your thoughts, experiences, and ideas with the world.
What Is A Blogger?
Bloggers are people who write about their experiences and share useful information with others.
They use their blogs to build relationships with their blog readers and receive feedback on topics from them. By sharing their thoughts online, bloggers help others learn more about topics that interest them.
What Is the Future of Blogging?
As predicted, blogging should grow in popularity in the future as more people turn to the internet to share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas on various topics.
Why Blogging is the Best for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Blogging is the best for SEO because it provides the best way to build links and shares, and generate traffic.
Blogging also helps create interest in your business, which in turn can help with search engine rankings.
How Do People Make Money from Blogging?
Bloggers make money from their blog content in a few different ways.
One way is by selling products, services, or affiliate links through their blog content.
Another way is by selling advertising space on their blogs.
Finally, bloggers can also make money by setting up an online store and selling products that are hard to find elsewhere.
How to Start Full-Time Income Blogging?
Blogging can be a great way to earn a full-time income, but it requires dedication and hard work.
To be a successful blogger, you’ll need to find a profitable niche that you’re passionate about and build a platform that connects with your readers.
Passive income from your blog will come slowly at first, but it will increase over time if you continue to produce high quality and useful content.
What is Blogging for Money?
Blogging for money is a term used to describe the practice of monetizing your blog through affiliate marketing or advertising.
Blogging for money can be done in a few different ways. One way is to monetize a blog through affiliate marketing.
It means you will earn a commission if someone clicks on one of your affiliate links and purchases a product or service.
Another method to make money from blogging is through advertising.
This means placing ads on your blog and collecting ad revenue every time someone clicks on your ad.
Both methods of making money from blogging require dedication and hard work, but they can be very lucrative if you are successful at it.
If you are interested in starting or improving your blog’s monetization strategy, we recommend reading our guide on how to make money from a blog.
How to Get Traffic from Search Engines?
Search engines like Google are the most popular way for users to find websites.
If you want more traffic, your best option is to focus on increasing rankings in the SERPs by optimizing content and increasing engagement.
What Content Should You Post on Your Blog?
Different types of blog content can perform well on a blog website.
A great blog post answers common questions and provides practical guides for readers.
The language and format should be easy to understand, and the blog posts should be original.
Good blog content is often visually appealing and easy to understand.
Good blog content pays attention to SEO best practices, such as using keywords throughout the blog post to help boost search engine rankings.
How Can You Promote Your Product or Service Through Blogging?
There are many ways to promote your product or service through blogging.
You can use marketing techniques such as SEO, social media, or your website to reach potential customers.
You can also repurpose blog content to promote your business across different platforms.
By doing this, you will be able to reach your target audience and convert leads into sales.
Having a blog also allows you to repurpose old content and reach a wider audience.
How to Include Blogging in Content Strategy?
Blogging is essential for content marketing strategy because it allows you to develop a purpose and plan for your blog content.
Additionally, it helps you to research different content management systems, brainstorm ideas, and more.