1. Articles are listed in chronological order with the newest article at the top.
This is a very consistent element of every blog I have ever come across. Articles are listed with a title followed by the body content, starting at the top of the page with the most recently published article followed by the next most recent, and so on. This format is a legacy of the “journaling” aspect of blogging. The term blog is derived from “weblog” which essentially means online diary or journal. An important point to make, despite the journalistic style history, is that blogs today are not all diaries and are not only about the personal lives of the authors. Blogs today can be about any subject, written by one or many authors and certainly are not all personal diaries. Personal reflection, opinion and tone all have a place in blogs, but that doesn’t affect the breadth or scope of topics covered.

2. It’s easy to add new content.
Normal websites have one chronic problem that kept everyday people from creating one – they are just too technical. Even with sophisticated content management systems, website creation was out of the reach of your average web surfer. Blogs changed things. They provide a content publishing system so easy to use that the average net surfer, with some practice, can become a blogger and publish content to the World Wide Web. When content publishing became as easy as writing email, the barriers to entry were lowered enough for it to go mainstream and we now have a world filled with millions of blogs.

3. Content is updated frequently.
Another major problem that plagues traditional websites is their static nature. Most websites never change and you always come back to the same pages with the same content. The reason for this is point two above – it is too hard for the average person to add content to a website. Sure, many popular sites were updated frequently before blogs came along, but they have the backing of large organizations with technical staff and writers, or are managed by people who understand things like HTML, FTP and web servers. Most people do not speak this language and until blogs became available it was hard for the average person to publish their ideas online. Blogs lower the barriers to publishing enough so the average person can do it. As a result the Web is inundated with content producers (bloggers) writing and publishing articles on a regular basis, sometimes multiple articles per day. Websites have never been as dynamic as today’s blogs. A spin-off effect has been the rise of blogs in search engines. Search engines like Google reward sites that publish valuable content on a consistent basis. Blogs, by their nature, do this (assuming motivated bloggers are running them) and so rise high in search engine rankings. As a result of blogs “stealing” top search engine rankings, they receive even more attention, capturing the focus of Internet marketers and business owners as they look to blogs as potential marketing tools for their products and services.

4. Blogs allow people to leave comments.
A significant evolution when comparing a traditional website to a blog is the addition of the comments function. Each article published to a blog has an input box to allow any person from the public to leave a comment on that article. This enhancement turned websites from one-way broadcasting devices, to two-way communication tools. Readers can directly communicate with the author of the content, carry on the conversation started by the article and essentially turn a blog into a community. This last point is more powerful than you think, and here’s why…