Chances are you’ve noticed that although a blog is just another website you can browse through your web browser, there are certain characteristics and components of a blog that make it a blog and not a conventional website.

To know and build a better business blog, you ought to understand what makes a blog unique on its own, more than a simple and probably static website.

Here are some of the most common properties of a blog:

1. Title - A title is the part which appears on all blog pages, HTML title and the accompanying RSS feed, sometimes followed by a short description or subtitle (or tag) to further describe the topic of your blog. A good blog describes itself clearly through title and description lines.
2. Post/Content body - Individual content of a blog is called a post. It is anything you write and submit to your blog, including but not limited to news, articles, rants, opinions, etc.

   Posts are the life-blood of any blog. They are the only factors that make a blog interesting, boring, and anything between. I’ve seen awfully designed blogs with loyal readers because they posted great contents regularly.

   This is not to say that design is not important. It is, but not to the extent that sacrifice content.

3. Comment and comment submission form - By allowing readers to comment on your post, you suggest that you openly welcome suggestions, let anyone to agree, point to other information, expand the discussion and as the result, involve in dialogues.
4. RSS/Atom feed links (syndication) - The RSS feed links give visitors the option to subscribe to the feed so they can read the updated content of a blog in their own RSS readers or aggregators.

   These links are totally optional. Some sites provide only RSS or atom feed, yet others allow readers to easily subscribe to popular online news aggregators other than the ability to copy the link to the blog feed itself.

5. Topics/Categories - Topics are a list of categories and sub-categories in which you have posted your posts in. It also functions as a navigation menu for the user to browse your posts.
6. Archives - You can choose to display daily, weekly or monthly archives of the blog post. Every post that you have submitted will be managed into the archives according to the categories you selected and on which date the posts were submitted.
7. Calendar - Visitors can quickly browse according to the date of blog posts and reference the newest items since the last time they visited. Calendar is an optional part of a blog and somewhat adds the blog functionally and aesthetically.
8. Blogroll - Usually have favorite list of blogs they read regularly, links to interesting sites or anything of importance. The list is called a blogroll. OPML is a format used to syndicate blogroll, RSS feeds and other type of list, in case a weblog author want others to be able to access his/her blogroll.

Even if two blogs are using the same software, usually they are not exactly different due to customizable templates and layouts and probably location of each of the property of the blog itself. The best way to familiarize yourself with blogs is actually use, read, browse and interact with it.