Blogging is definitely on fire right now. Blog is what they call a Web 2.0 application. Blog comes from the combination of 2 words, web+log, which is equivalent to weblog, I know, but everyone simply calls it blog.
Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of websites. When the web started, only those who knew how to build websites put things on the internet. This is known as Web 1.0. Where it was a one-way communication, if you had the knowledge, you created the sites and people read what you put.
The problem was that the Internet as a whole is really about interaction. With Web 1.0, all the interaction a person browsing the web could do is click on another page. Soon, the desire for interaction and the need for us to be less technical created a whole wave of websites where you and others could interact.
Soon the sites began to have basic plugins for us, the less technical, to start creating our own web pages… Web 2.0 was born! Including sites like MySpace, FaceBook and the birth of the Blog.
Blogs were a way to communicate with other Internet users without having to have the necessary technical knowledge to create a web page. Blogs started as online journals, then progressed to themed blogs, and now you can find niche blogs as well as business blogs.
What makes a blog unique and great for internet marketing is that a blog usually has only one topic or niche. So, the people who visit and interact on a blog are those who are really interested in the topic or niche! Blogs, by nature, automatically weed out people who aren’t interested, so blogging is like aiming a laser at an audience.
Previously, you could only do this effectively through pay-per-click advertising. Typically, only people interested in the ad would click on the ad. You only pay for those people who click on the ad, even though the ad could be shown to hundreds of people per hour, maybe only 10 click on it, you only pay for those 10.
Now you can achieve the same narrowing of your target audience with a blog. But the best part is that you can set up and have blogs for free from many hosts. You do not have to pay for the target audience that visits it. But you can control the theme and the items you can see related to the theme.
That is why you will see more and more blogs popping up every day. Also, you will start to see more and more blogs used for internet marketing purposes instead of just topic groups that are gathered on the internet.
This is also the reason why blogging could very well be the next internet craze for the internet marketer. You still have to generate traffic, but you have to do it with everything anyway. With proper SEO, article marketing, and linking methods, you can also drive traffic to your blog for free.