What Is a Blog?

If you’re reading this on the Mediator Tech website or in an email sent automatically to you whenever I post a new article on Mediator Tech, then you’re reading a blog. Mediator Tech is a business blog.

If you’re unfamiliar with business blogs, you may have assumed you were viewing a regular old website.

A blog is a type of website. While a traditional website, also called a “static” site, is designed essentially as a read-only provider of information, a blog organizes information in a specific way and is intended to be interactive.

At the time I’m writing this, most mediators have static websites if you have a website at all. Your site serves primarily as an online brochure. The simplest version has a home page that welcomes the visitor, a page or several pages describing your services, perhaps pages with links to a few articles you’ve written, frequently asked questions, your contact information, and the like. You intend the website to be informational and you update it only occasionally.

Unless you’re familiar with building websites, you either used a low-cost template into which you could “pour” your information or you paid someone several thousand dollars to build your site for you. With the former, your site looks like others’ sites and does little to distinguish you from the pack. With the latter, your site may be more distinguishable but it’s going to continue to cost you every time you want to make a change.

A blog uses specific, easy-to-learn software to organize a website in a certain way. Articles, called posts, are listed in reverse chronological order, so your most recent writing is viewed first when a visitor arrives on your main blog page. Blogs can have both “posts” (articles) and “pages” (static pages with information about you, contact, testimonials, etc.).

Blogs also typically allow the visitor to view articles by category or by date. For instance, if you visit the Mediator Tech site, you can find article categories such as ADR Blogging, ADR Resources, Software, Gadgets, Website Advice, and so on. If you click on a category, you’ll find a list of all articles I’ve written and placed in that category. It’s an easy way for you to find all articles on a topic in which you’re primarily interested, without having to wade through other articles to locate them.

Alternatively, you can click on Mediator Tech’s Archive and find a page organized by month and date. This is a helpful tool if you’re trying to find an article you recall seeing in August, for instance, or if you quickly want to scroll through post titles.

Blogs also have a feature that makes them highly relevant for dialogue marketing: They invite the reader to interact with what’s written. If you’re reading this on the Mediator Tech site, take a moment and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You’ll see a section titled Talk to me! and a space for you to leave a comment on this post.

Bloggers love to hear from readers. While the majority of readers don’t leave comments, as business blogging catches on, more and more people understand that the blogger relies on comments to do a better job with the blog. Commenters let the blogger know what resonated most with you, what questions you still have, what confused you or stopped you short.

Some of my best clients have come to me via comments left on one of my business blogs. The comments turned out to be the start of a conversation that went somewhere compelling.

Blogging software does this all with literally the click of a button or two. It’s designed to make the management of content simple and intuitive; indeed, I first started blogging seriously when I realized the software served as a perfect Content Management System (CMS). Organizing all those articles I’d been writing for my e-zine was so elegantly simple I was hooked instantly.

Static sites have significant limitations to interactivity, easy categorizing and archiving, and frequent updating. While most of these can be done with some work, static sites don’t typically use software designed with those functions in mind and so are cumbersome in carrying them out. Not to mention that for most of you reading this, it means relying on the teenager next door to do it for you or paying your tech guy or gal handsomely to keep you relevant.

On the other hand, there’s really nothing you can do with a static site that you can’t achieve with a blog.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.