I just realized that not many people actually know what a blog is. I have written quite some articles about making money with blogs, but I didn’t know I was getting some people confused because they don’t even know what a blog is, talk less of making money with it.

Forgive me for this if you are one of these sets of my esteemed readers, I will now explain what blogs are.

A blog is a content management system. A content management system means that you can publish your articles, pictures (or images), videos, and audios, edit them, add links, and do other things, and have them displayed on the Internet by a click for people to read or view.

A blog enables you to publish whatever you want on the Internet without needing to have knowledge of HTML or how to design and run websites, to be able to do so. Before blogs were invented, you would need websites if you desired to publish contents on the Internet, but now ordinary folks have become online publishers using blogs.

Blogs are very easy and simple to use and edit. All you need to do is to log in to your blog after you have set it up with your user name and password, and from your dashboard you will find the different links to where you will be able to edit anything, post your articles, insert pictures, codes, etc that you want to show. Everything is done from one spot, and that’s why it is a system that manages web contents.

See my other blogs as examples of what blogs look like: Online Writing Opportunities, Success Principles Online.

One of the things you can easily notice in blogs is that after reading a post, you can make your comment about it. If approved, you will see your comment, as well as other people’s comments appearing.

By reading other people’s comments, and the blog owner’s response, in addition to the original article, you can get a great deal of information about that topic on that blog. This is why blogs have become very popular with most Internet users who use the Internet mainly to get information.

Initially, that is, at the beginning of blogs, people used it as an online diary, where they post contents daily relating to their daily activities. They shared with their readers their experiences, their love, pains, and joys, their mistakes or weakness and their strength.

Today, a lot of people use blogs differently. They set up blogs on subjects they have knowledge of or experience in, or subjects they can research and provide contents for even though they are not experienced in them.

As people come to read their blogs, they will then be able to make money from the blogs through the monetization strategies they are using. You can read about different blog monetization strategies that I posted in a previous article: 16 Ways To Make Make Money With Your Blog, read it here: 16 Ways To Make Money With Your Blog.

Blogs are free to set up, however you will need to pay for domain name registration and a hosting service to be able to install your blog. If you intend to use a free blog, such as blogger.com, which I don’t encourage for a number of reasons, which I have written about in some of my previous posts, you will get the hosting free on blogger.com’s subdomain.

There are different platforms, which provide blogs for people to use for free. These include WordPress, b2evolution, and nucleus. Of these, WordPress is widely acclaimed to be the best.

They have thousands of free themes and plugins people can use to make their blogs highly functional and professionally looking. I will explain what themes, plugins and widgets are:

Themes: as used in blogging, themes are the different designs and looks of blogs. WordPress provides thousands of free themes you can customize and use.

Plugins: plugins are small pieces of software created to provide additional functionality to blogs. For instance, you can install a plugin that allows pictures of visitors to your blog who make comments on your posts to show as I have on this blog.