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The answer isn’t as simple as a “yes” or a “no.” It has changed in some ways and remained the same in many other ways. Some things have come up recently and improved the experience, like guest blogging services, while others that used to be useful have been phased out with time.
Blogging has come a long way from what it used to be. When it started out, it was a way to journal your thoughts and put them online. However, as it caught on, it evolved into a very effective communications mode that would allow blogs to reach out to a large portion of their target audience.
Page Views Equal Money
Because of the nature of blogging, where audiences could subscribe to a blog and engage with the blogger and each other in the commenting section, blogging eventually lent itself well to monetization. The most popular bloggers could count on all of their blogs getting a lot of page views and so they could leverage that to post banner ads and add affiliate links and the like. They could also ultimately sell ebooks, merchandise and other products of their own to their followers.
With time, however, a few things began to change that led to the rules of blogging changing:
- With the rise of RSS feeds, users could read blog posts from their favorite blogs without actually having to visit the site. This led to a massive decline in the traffic going to many popular blogs, and their ad revenue went down as a result.
- Social media also came along with its own disruption to the industry. With the rise of social media, more of the time spent online by users was allocated to social media. Social media has been both a blessing and a curse for blogging in a variety of ways. It is a blessing because it has made it cheaper for bloggers to distribute their content to more people. It has been a curse because now bloggers cannot be satisfied with focusing on just a single audience. They now have to reach out to a dozen audiences in a dozen different places.
- SEO has also changed in many ways that have had a bearing on blogging. Keyword stuffing, which used to be a viable SEO technique doesn’t work anymore. Also, the way to generate traffic has also changed. While SEO changes have happened to improve the blogging experience for users, it has led to the death of many blogs as a result.
So, blogs have evolved, and the field of blogging isn’t what it used to be a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean blogging or guest blogging is dead. The paradigm is what has changed. A blog is now a content creation hub that you use to create value for your audience. Social media helps you distribute that content to your audience. It is still a powerful way to drive traffic to your website and is guaranteed to bring value back to you ultimately. However, don’t use it as your main selling tool. Instead, it should be part of your broader marketing funnel. Guest blogging still has its place in this ecosystem and, if used in the right way, is guaranteed to bring you massive benefits.
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
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- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link