Nothing.
6 years ago they meant two different things to most people you asked. A blog was a specific kind of website where the author wrote long pieces about their interests, desires, art or other passions. Most never considered making money doing it and did it as a hobby.
Then blogs were found to be the darlings of Google. Google loved the content and the words that were added to the authors’ content in the form of comments. Community and interactivity played a big part in the success of running a website on blog software.
Today, just about every site built on the web is built wholly or partially with blog software.
The truth is, there never was a legitimate distinction between blog sites and web sites. They are one in the same. A domain and a content management system = website.
Some businesses need shopping cart software to organize, display, and describe their large product line. But shopping carts outside of Amazon and other large shopping sites don’t get good organic traffic. Many smaller shopping cart-based sites have added blogs to deliver that content that Google so loves to rank.
Suffice it to say, pretty much no one is building straight html sites these days with Dreamweaver. Certainly not the masses who have neither the time nor the inclination to learn html and design. Not when you can just download WordPress, grab a domain, install a free template and be publishing within a matter of hours.
Blogs are just content management systems (CMS)
And a huge array of businesses in all markets are using blog software for their core web presence.
“Blogging” is where people get confused
You are only a blogger if you primarily focus on writing content. In that case, your biggest daily function is to produce words.
You are a publisher if you spread your work out to include marketing your site and organizing others to help with the content production for the site to buy you the time needed to take on a bigger role of gaining exposure and attracting readership.
And regardless of your daily functions above, you are a website owner.
Blog software offers the most flexibility in online publishing
It is easy for the layperson to set up without a huge learning curve.
Blogs provide the tools necessary for successful reader attraction and retention, from commenting to integration with social media via countless widgets offered by social media sites to bind blogs with their sites and communities.
Blogs have singlehandedly changed the game in online publishing by making it so anyone can get in the game, regardless of their technical background.
Over 92 million words were written on WordPress hosted blogs last Sunday.
On a SUNDAY. And that’s just at WordPress.com. Today, A Thursday, over 109 million words were written on blogs at WordPress.com.
That doesn’t count what people are generating when they publish on their own domains. (WordPress software is downloaded over 28,000 times per day.) -Source: http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
“Can you make money blogging?” is entirely the wrong question!
Just because most people who publish online don’t make anything significant from it (or even count that as a motivating factor for why they do it) doesn’t mean we can ignore the fact that those who choose to monetize their sites or use blog publishing as a means to draw attention to their products and services aren’t profiting from it.
We’re past the testing stage of whether average people can make full or part-time income from their sites. Or whether a coach, author, or local plumber can get more business by using blog software to publish attractive content for their target markets.
The only problem with blog publishing and making a business out of it is the same age-old problem that existed well before blogs and even the internet. And that’s the problem of motivation and entrepreneurial spirit. Most people don’t have any more of what it takes to build a business today than they ever have in history.
If you have a blog, you have a website.
In fact, you have a site that can do anything and more than traditional, static websites. (Which could be counted as a dead mode of web publishing years ago.)
It’s what you do with that site and how hard you work to build your business with it that matters. The “how” is all that matters. If you have a site, I assume it’s a blog-driven site. What I’m more interested in is how you’re using it to build your business.
