The evolution and success of blogs
Content creation has proven to be a strong pillar in today’s marketing. Before the age of Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, blogging was present. Blogging has had its ups and downs and amazing innovation over the past 20 years. Now it is considered a career in a very diversified way.
A lot of the bloggers who started as early as the 90’s were probably the same who was a frontrunner in using the Internet in the 80’s. According to Hubspot’s documentation, Justin Hall, who was a Swarthmore college undergrad, opened a fresh site called links.net in 1994. It was essentially a review of HTML examples he came across from various online links, but that was enough for him to be dubbed as the “founding father of personal bloggers”.
We have come a long way from the HTML example blogging now. Over the 2000’s, blogging turned out to be a source of expression for many – teenagers and adults alike. Blogging was turned into such a viable platform that WordPress, The Guardian, YouTube, and many blog-based publications made their introduction in a five-year ratio.
Social Media and blogging
Introduction of Facebook, YouTube, Reddit etc changed the face of blogging and broadened the scope of it. Vlogging made its rounds and still does even if not as popular as before. Ranging from mommy bloggers to political bloggers, the blogosphere started to blend in with journalism over time.
Blogging was essentially considered a promising career after the first few years of the 2000’s. With its fair share of ups and downs, let’s talk about the current scenario and what to takes to be a career blogger in 2018.
Intention – Why do you want to pursue blogging?
If you have not braced yourself for the blogosphere and the surprising journey, here are some questions you can ask yourself before pursuing this art.
What do you want your content to be about?
Is this your passion?
Are you looking to make money out of this? If yes, are you expecting to make money immediately?
Are you building a business?
Are you trying to educate people?
These are some of the questions you ask yourself before you set foot into the crowded arena of blogging in 2018.
Why you shouldn’t start a blog?
Do note that, if you are expecting to make money out of your new blogs very early, it is going to be a disappointing process for you. The industry is tough with extreme competition and this can’t be a getaway for you from your corporate job if you are looking at this as a profession. So, if you are hoping to go viral in a day, the success rate is going to surprise you tremendously.
Here are some basic know-how for you to start a blog
Consistency
Write regularly. Do not lose interest after a couple of months and you do not see the result intended. Blogging success is a gradual process sometimes and it also involves the blogger not giving up.
Quality
The timelines are not an excuse for blogs with terrible quality.Ensure that plagiarism does not peek into the blog anywhere and give due credit, where required. The honest fact is that a blog is just like any small business and a lot of small businesses don’t break-even easily.
Make sure that your blogs have a distinct touch to it. We cannot emphasize this enough mainly because the generic blog writing has been around for over 20 years now and there are going to be some sort of dupes on the Internet. Ensure that plagiarism does not peek into the blog anywhere and give due credit, where required.
Using Marketing go-tos
There isn’t a map or blueprint that tells you what exactly to do and there’s a bit of an uneven playing field when it comes to marketing or just running a business in general. Blogging is a strong branch of marketing. So make sure that it implements some basics asking questions like
What’s the best time to publish a post
How often should I publish
How to drive more traffic
What are the tags I have to use?
How do I implement SEO?
if you are new to the SEO business, there are always free courses in Google and other websites that give you the basic understanding of the concept.
What does the future hold for blogging?
With a plethora of food, fashion and travel blogs today, what is the future? Blogging started as the base for content creation for companies. There are the early civilization influencers. What you can’t get from the 140 worded tweets on Twitter or a photo from Instagram, you find in blogs.
Your thoughts
I do have a network of bloggers I regularly communicate with. I know bloggers struggling to make fresh content, staying relevant or just losing interest because it wasn’t available to them monetarily?
I ask my fellow bloggers out there, how do you like this space? What are the constraints you face? How can we help each other? Do let us know below in the comments or visit our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages to know more about us.
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