Episode #6 - Blogging Is Not F**king Dead
Did blogging really die or did people stop talking about it?
🎤Preamble
If there is one thing I know well, it is blogging. My personal blog I Like Kill Nerds has been going for ten years (and counting). I go through periods of rapid blogging activity followed by quieter periods. 2018 was by far the best year for me visitor wise, my blog had 418,409 visitors, averaging 34,867 visitors per month.
You can also see that a majority of those visitors were new, most likely finding my blog from Google searches. In 2019, I didn’t blog nearly as much and the numbers reflect that. I had 290,658 visitors. A larger chunk of those visitors were first-timers.
While I have increased my frequency of blogging this year somewhat, the numbers so far are pointing to another drop-in visitors. A majority of the people that have visited in 2020 so far were new. I have noticed there is a correlation between blogging frequency and how much traffic Google sends my way.
📒Research
According to Growth Badger, there are over 600 million blogs on the Internet out of 1.7 billion websites, with a majority of those 488.1 million on Tumblr. Over 2 billion blog posts are published every year.
Blogs are highly favoured among content-marketers, with eight out of every ten producing blog posts.
Blog posts can help influence buying decisions for consumers, six out of ten buyers factoring in blog posts at the start of the buying journey.
There are more than 20 billion blog post views per month, according to open WordPress analytics.
52% of bloggers report that they are finding it increasingly difficult to get visitors to engage with their content. The average time spent on writing a post was close to 4 hours in 2019.
Blog posts with a word count between 2250 and 2500 words earn the most organic traffic. Articles with a word count of 2500 get shared the most on social media and articles with a word count over 2500 earn the most clicks.
Blog posts with relevant images get 94% more views than blog posts without.
Over 38% of sites on the internet today use WordPress as their content management system.
The most profitable blogging niches are; marketing, mummy, travel, personal finance, lifestyle, and food.
See how many blog posts have been published just today in real-time.
🧐Observations
Content is king. People value high-quality well-written content
Finding a niche is important. Niche blogs are easier to monetise and consistent than a blog that doesn’t target a niche.
Personal finance, followed by food blogs tend to make the highest amounts of money. Travel seems to make the least and with the ongoing pandemic, will probably not be as profitable for a while (at least, in the interim)
Blog posts with higher word counts tend to be shared more and rank better in search engine rankings
Blogging still has influence over consumers and how they make buying decisions
The number of blog posts published per month seems to be increasing year-on-year
Over half of bloggers find it difficult to engage their visitors
Content marketers love blogging
WordPress is the most popular content management system/blogging platform
You should be adding images into your blog posts if you want more views
🔎Opportunities
One of the clearest and most obvious opportunities here is starting a blog and targeting personal finance and food niches. Understandably, personal finance might be one of the least exciting niches to pick from.
My wife and I do this all of the time when we want to know how to cook something, we Google it. We couldn’t name a recipe website off of the top of our head. We rely on Google to give us recipes and star ratings, we use our Google Nest device with a screen in the kitchen which does a lot of the Googling for us these days.
But, there are a lot of recipe and food-oriented blogs. In fact, when I think of blogging I think of food. It’s highly competitive, but a lot of the traffic these blogs get is organic, so there is always room to take a slice of the pie (ha).
The thing with blogging is that it takes time and commitment, are you willing to devote years to building a blog and audience? For every problem, people are clamouring for a solution.
Do you have creative ways to help bloggers engage their visitors? Are you a good writer? maybe you can start a blog post copywriting service. Do you have an idea for a new blogging platform to take on Tumblr or WordPress? Can you leverage an AI offering like GPT-3 to help publishers produce blog posts quicker, even going as far as generating them for their chosen niche?
💌In Summary
Although it is hard to deny that YouTube, Instagram and streaming are hot-commodities in modern content, blogging is a tried and tested medium that is far from dead (and never will be). People might not talk about blogging as much, but a lot of people are still blogging and reading blog posts.
Just remember, when you Google a recipe or review for something, you’re not seeing Instagram, Facebook or Twitch in the search results, you’re seeing blog posts and YouTube videos.