Every so often you get a little flurry of articles about blogging and they all ask a variation on the same question. Yup, you guessed it. ‘Is blogging dead?’ Now, obviously I have a bit of a vested interest here. Writing blogs is a core part of my business so if everyone suddenly decides that blogs aren’t worth bothering with I might have a bit of a panic. Only a small one though. My granny was a farmer’s daughter and always taught me never to put all my eggs in one basket, so I do other stuff too.
So, is blogging dead? I don’t think so. Here’s why.
Blogging has changed
When blogging first emerged as a marketing tool it was easy to stand out because there weren’t that many people doing it. Audiences who were tired of hard sell marketing loved the fact that blogging offered useful information without the pressure. Since then it feels as if everyone and their budgie has a blog. The market is saturated and it’s harder to stand out.
The good news is that ‘harder’ is very different from ‘impossible’. These days, the key to building a successful blog is to treat it as part of a larger strategy. Frankly, if you want to succeed in business it’s exactly what you should be doing anyway. If all of your marketing posts have the same focus your blog can be a central piece of content that helps your audience get to know you and builds your reputation.
Video isn’t for everyone
If you really don’t like the idea of a written blog you can still do a video version. Even Facebook were taken by surprise at how quickly video has taken off and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere just get. The issue with a video blog is that you can’t say as much. Videos on social media are generally better in bite size form. You’ll probably be able to read this blog in about 5 minutes but if I sat in front of a camera and read it out to you then you’d swiftly nod off. I’ll generally do a video that gives a quick summary of a topic with a link to the blog if they want more detail, so they have a choice.
There’s also the fact that some people still prefer to read things. One of the main advantages for me is that I can read something while the kids build a Lego fortress around my feet. Try that with an unmuted video and I’ll suddenly have a 5 year old on my shoulder asking for YouTube. The point is that presenting your content in different ways means that you’re more likely to get the message across.
People are still searching
I keep hearing that SEO is dead, with keywords coming in for particular abuse. If you suspect that might be true, here’s a statistic for you – at the last count there were just over 63,000 searches on Google every second. That’s around 2 trillion searches a year. Google is still using its search algorithms to rank websites and individual pages into order of importance. That makes SEO important in my book.
What has changed are the techniques you need to use. Writing SEO content used to mean stuffing your blogs and website full of as many keywords as possible, regardless of whether they made any sense. When you’re blogging now it’s more important to create useful content that people will want to read. That way, when someone asks Google a question they’re more likely to find you as the answer.
If you’d like to find out more about how to use blogging as part of your marketing strategy, sign up to my mailing list. You’ll receive a copy of my free guide ‘Stop hiding your business’.
Further reading
If you’d like to read some interesting stats about blogging, here you go