As the years go by, some things never change; like the annual claims that “blogging is dead!”
Blogging is dead! Who says so?
In my experience, these reports tend to be written by people, who either don’t currently have a blog OR people who have a blog, which no one reads. If you check the numbers over at my marketing blog, techcrunch, mashable, scobleizer or any popular blog – you will see a very different picture to the doom and gloom some ill-informed experts claim.
You see, it’s easy to believe blogging’s dead if your blog has very few readers. However, if the problem was with the blogging platform, why would wordpress be kicking Twitter’s ass right now when it comes to growth?
Numbers please!
Certainly. Wordpress.com is growing faster than Twitter. Did you know that? Well, if you did, you are clearly a very well-informed reader. That’s because you won’t have heard this anywhere in the mainstream media. The regular news outlets continue to shout about the amazing success of Twitter, but few if any mentioned that Twitter’s growth rate slowed significantly in recent months.
Even fewer reported that Mat Mullenweg’s amazing blogging platform grew like crazy! (Matt, you’re a genius!) With such biased reporting, it’s easy for bloggers to think that it’s the blogging platform that’s on it’s ass, when in fact, the exact opposite is true.
Blogging and Twitter
I guess my main point here is that fellow bloggers need only focus on developing a blog they love, that’s worth reading and then market it correctly, if they want to succeed with whatever their goals are. This not not easy – but it is achievable with a ton of work and the right kind of help.
Twitter, (which I LOVE) compliments blogging – it’s not an either or situation. The growth of twitter REALLY helped me develop my blogs. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a successful blogger, who doesn’t use Twitter a great deal. (Including all those I mentioned earlier)
Bottom line: The success of YOUR blog is down to YOU. The blogging platform is alive and in VERY good health!
What do you think?
Photo: BennyLin0724
Your post made me smile. Blogging is only dead for one more category of people: those that can’t figure out how to leverage it for their marketing purposes…
All of the blogging success stories, the apocryphal “17-year old kid that made a million bucks”, made blogging look like an easy path to financial success. The problem with this idea is the same as any other get-rich-quick scheme: it only works very rarely – and it takes a *lot* of work.
People say books are dead too. Tell that to Seth Godin ( http:/bigbucksinternetmarketing.com/members/unleashing-the-ideavirus/ ), who, by the way, works very hard.
Which, I suppose is the key to the entire concept, it takes work to make things happen.
I agree.
Those stories from the 90’s – about kids making millions from their bedroom certainly created a huge perception problem.
Thanks for the comment Stephen!
There will always be groups proclaiming the death of one thing or another. Supposedly, disco died in the 70s, but some of the music I hear on radio sounds suspiciously like disco.
How about paper being obsolete? Remember when we all started getting computers, and the big thing was that we’d all have paperless offices? How’s that working out?
I don’t pay much attention to people who make grand proclamations without the evidence to back ‘em up.
Paperless offices won’t come about until digital signatures can be verified with the veracity of a real signature, and digital data becomes as permanent as stuff printed on paper.
Still, I know people who do 90% of their stuff via computer and Blackberry. More and more people are going that way. I don’t even read paper books that often anymore.
Don’t read paper books? Heresy! You young whippersnappers these days…
Hi Jim,
Thanks a lot for the encouragement. We’ve only been blogging for a couple of months but are building up a steady and slowly improving reader base. It’s good to know that we might continue to do so.
A blog is the totality of facts, not of pings
Turkey Baz´s last blog ..Seasonal Food in Turkey – Rodos Kabağı
I really like the point you make that there is always a report of “this-or-that is dead”, when it has lost its luster of newness. Apart from Wordpress, blogging can’t be considered dead when Facebook is, in reality, the largest blogging platform being used worldwide, which keeps growing.
The idea of blogging your way to riches has been an urban legend for the most part; the few who do well are accomplished business people who are working at it with real dedication, treating their blog writing and maintaining their sites as seriously as working at any other kind of job. Writing a blog regularly (as regularly as clocking into a 9-to-5 job) is hard work. On the other hand, true, there are countless blogs that are started and left untouched after just a few months of sporadic entries, or perhaps after a year or two, when inspiration runs out. Many businesses run through a cycle where the owners cannot infuse more time/capital/interest to keep it alive, and the business must close.
The blogging concept will probably hang around for a long time, just as the personal journal, memoir and essay collection (the older, print-based version of blogging) has been around and also will probably hang around as long as people are interested in watching other people’s stories unfold over time.
Dean Meyers´s last blog ..If I can speak corporate, will you love me?