The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier. People maintained blogs long before the creation of the term blog.

As new technologies appear every day, the definition of blogging is something that is constantly changing. Technology is continuously redefining what a blog is, what a blog can be, and what a blog should do.

For many years, the definition of a blog was a text-based website that kept records of days, similar to a captain’s log on a ship or a journal. However, this started to change as the group of people who kept blogs became more diverse. The more bloggers began to explore the limits of the medium and of the technology that made it possible, the more the boundaries expanded of what a “blog” was.

Today, there is an abundance of blogs: personal blogs, business blogs, photo blogs, and even video blogs. Mobile blogging devices are changing the definition of blogging entirely by making it possible for a blogger to create even more types of posts. (This form of blogging is a moblog).

I mentioned business blogs earlier and there is yet another element of the blogging world starting to redefine blogging. That is the corporate blog. Companies are using corporate blogs to announce new products and services or to react to public criticism on a particular issue.

As more and more companies hire writers to keep blogs with the sole purpose of creating positive buzz about their brand, blogger’s across the globe are arguing about whether these corporate blogs are really worthy of the name.

Between all of these different forces that are constantly expanding and reshaping the blogging world, it is difficult to imagine the definition of what is and is not a blog remaining fixed for very long.

Blog: What is the 2008 definition? No one definition entirely fits a blog.

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Anita Bruton is a freelance writer specializing in providing promotional and marketing material to small businesses, entrepreneurs and other business professionals. For a free report on promoting your business online, visit her website at http://www.anitaspen.com.

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What is the purpose of your blog? Of course, the answer is to drive visitors to buy your products or use your services. The longer your visitors hang around your blog reading the information you share, the more they get to know you, like you and trust you. How can you keep your visitors interested enough to hang around and read more?
Here are five tips to keep those vital visitors happy:

1. Give your blog visitors unique content. Be original. People stick around longer if they find something that they haven’t seen anywhere else. This doesn’t mean your content has to be totally unique. It can be similar to other content but put a twist on it. Take this blogging series for example. Plenty of other blogs write about blogs and blogging. But I put my blog and blogging posts into a series.
2. Give your visitors a way to save or print the material you write. Of course there is the standard copy and paste into a word document or right click and print; but look what I’ve done with the Writers Corner. I give you a way to save each post as a PDF. Save it to your computer for future reference or print it out.
3. Provide an online directory of resources and links for your visitors. My resource and links page is a growing list of people and sites that I have done business with or who provide information I find useful and hope my readers will as well.
4. Make your text easy on the eyes. You do not want it too big or too small. You don’t want it too light or too dark. Too big and your text can come across as yelling, much the same as using all caps. Too small, and your text becomes difficult to read. Use a 12 pt font for consistent results. Try to use a black or dark blue font on a white background for easy reading. Too light, and visitors will be straining their eyes to see it.
5. Be professional and double check your content for spelling and grammar errors. Mistakes in spelling and grammar are huge turn offs to your visitors. Please, please, edit and proofread carefully! Even after you publish your post, go back in a day or two and read it again. Often a mistake that was hiding from you will blatantly pop out a couple of days later when your eyes are seeing it fresh!

There you have it; “Five ways to keep your visitors reading more and reading longer.”

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Anita Bruton is a freelance writer specializing in providing promotional and marketing material to small businesses, entrepreneurs and other business professionals. For a free report on promoting your business online, visit her website at Http://www.anitaspen.com.

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