What’s going on in the world of blogging?
Posted on 20th December 2019
Did you know that blogging has been around for 25 years? It’s generally agreed that the first ever blog was started in 1994 by a student called Justin Hall, who wanted somewhere to publish his writing.
Each of the short articles Justin posted contained a link to other websites he enjoyed reading, or to his own writing. The new online craze soon caught on and, in 1997, the term ‘weblog’ was coined, and soon shortened to ‘blog’.
Over the last 20 years, blogging platforms have come and gone, with video blogging - or ‘vlogging’ - joining the party in 2000.
Two years before that, in 1998, came what was probably the biggest change to impact on the internet to date: the launch of Google.
Almost overnight, the style and purpose of writing blog articles changed forever. The original aims of blogging – to educate, interest and engage the reader, and demonstrate expertise in the writer’s field – were usurped by the pursuit of the Holy Grail of good Google rankings.
Unfortunately for people who enjoyed reading well-written articles, this sea-change led to the internet becoming swamped by poor quality content. Keyword stuffing and other forms of SEO spamming were rife.
Thankfully, Google cottoned on to these tactics at an early stage. The search engine has consistently updated its algorithms ever since to promote original, high quality content that’s useful and relevant, as opposed to ‘salesy’.
Despite this, the question still has to be asked: why are business owners blogging today?
Is it all down to the original reasons of education, engagement and so on? Or are we simply creating content (well-written or otherwise) because Google and digital marketing experts tell us this is what we need to do to get our companies found online?
I suspect it’s a mixture of both for most business owners, probably with more of a lean towards the SEO side.
Whatever the answer might be, it can’t be denied that blogging is effective, both in terms of SEO rankings and return on investment.
Take a look at these statistics:
84% of consumers have made purchases after reading about a product or service in a blog article.
Marketers who prioritise blogging over other types of content creation are 13 times more likely to generate a positive return on investment for their efforts.
10% of blog posts are compounding, which means that organic searches increase the number of visits to the articles over time.
70% of people prefer to read articles about a business to reading adverts
Considering these figures, it’s not surprising that regular blogging tends to feature in pretty much every digital marketing strategy created today.
Writing blog articles is still a major element within the content creation landscape, helping your website stay fresh and up to date with the new information that’s needed to keep people coming back for more.
Blogging is also inexpensive compared to some other forms of content marketing, especially if you write your own articles and use royalty-free images.
In fact, it’s worth noting that the cost factor could end up making blogging even more popular in years to come, as social media channels promote paid-for content over organic posts, and other platforms such as email marketing gradually reduce or shut down their free service packages.
These developments are likely to make business owners prioritise more cost-effective methods of search engine optimisation in the future – and blogging will almost certainly come out on top.
So, whether you write your articles for educational purposes or simply to boost your SEO rankings, it looks like blogging is here to stay.
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