Is blogging dead and what is the future of blogging? Let's talk about this today
because I've got this question so many times from people who are on the verge of starting a blog.
Is it too late to start a blog this year? Would it make you feel better if I told you
I was asking myself the same question in 2017 when I started my blog.
And other bloggers were asking the same questions in 2015 and before that.
But the reality is, every year people start new blogs and many of them will make a
full-time income with their blogs in just 1-2 years of consistently working on them.
Hi! I'm Anastasia and I started my blog anastasiablogger.com about 4 years ago,
and honestly, it was the best decision I ever made. By the end of the first year of blogging,
I made over $1400 in the first month when my blog was accepted to Mediavine. It's a display
advertising management company. I was making some money with the blog even before that but
the first income report above $1000/mo happened by the end of the first year and soon after I
decided to quit my day job and focus on the blog. Since then, I've published many income reports
and you can check this one for example for the month when I made over $40,000
with my blogging business. I'll give you a link to that video up there and in the description below.
And you could say well, good for you Anastasia, but that's your story. Well,
allow me to respectfully disagree, I can actually give you some numbers to convince you.
If we look up the popularity of the search term “blogging” in Google Trends for the
last 5 years Worldwide, you will find that this keyword has a pretty stable interest.
Now, I understand why this question, if blogging is dead, is so consistent because everyone who
starts a blog goes through a very difficult phase when you put in a lot of work and you are
not seeing almost any results. Maybe you can see some visitors coming to your site but definitely,
you won't make enough money to replace your full-time income with blogging right away.
Not in the first year of blogging for sure. So during this first year of blogging
so many people just can't keep working, they give up too early. But if you start your blog
with the right expectations and with a lot of patience, then your efforts will pay off for sure.
And you know, blogging is not going anywhere. It's a fact that every year more and more people will
search for information online before they make purchasing decisions, to learn something new,
to find some parenting advice. You know, when I was a child my mom had a thick book with recipes
in the kitchen. Nowadays, everyone just goes online to find something interesting to cook for
dinner. Even your grandmother probably doesn't use those old hardcover recipe books anymore.
Basically, every time you search on the internet for any information, you are looking
for blogs that shared something on this topic. And if you think about it, this whole Internet
thing has been really a big part of our life for what, about 20 years now? And people have
been asking if blogging is dead for the last 10 years, right? Now, how about newspapers,
have they been around for like 10-20 years before they started seeing serious problems on the market
being replaced by online information? To make the point, I even looked it up
and found that the first newspapers were published at the very beginning of the 17th century, around
1605-06. So about 4 centuries later are newspapers dead? Probably people don't get
all the information from newspapers in the 21st century because we have the Internet
now. But newspapers are still here to stay. So I think blogging is not even close to the
stage that newspapers reached by this point in their development cycle. Blogging is probably
really close to its best, most prosperous times. It's true, if you start a blog today, in most of
the niches there will be some competition, and you won't be the first in your niche.
But we can say the same about any market. If you are not the first one, does it mean there
is no space or market for you to start your own product? If it was true, we'd have just a couple
of brands in each category of products, but we have hundreds of automobile brands, and thousands
of fashion and clothing brands and there is room for everyone when the market is growing,
and when there is demand for the product. Yes, blogging IS constantly evolving over
these years and every time there is a change, people use it as a new excuse to ask,
and now, is blogging dead? Clickbait articles have been
claiming that SEO is dead of about 10 years now. Linkbuilding has been "dead" for about
the same amount of time. Guest posting is dead. I found an article in the Search Engine Journal
that was questioning if guest posting is dead since 2012!
Here we are 10 years later and guess what is still the best opportunity to grow your domain authority
on a new blog? Guest posting on high-quality authoritative non-spammy websites in your niche.
It's true that if you don't follow the trends in the blogging world and don't update your
strategies from what you used 5 or 10 years ago, then yes your blog might be more dead than alive.
If you are not sure which strategies are outdated and wanted to ask me, the best place to do it is
in the comments below this video! I personally reply to as many questions in the comments as I
can, so don't miss this opportunity because well, I know about blogging a thing or two and will be
happy to share with you what I learned :) Don't forget to like the video,
subscribe to my channel, and hit the bell button if you don't want to miss my new videos.
I'll be very thankful for your likes and comments on the video because your support genuinely can
make my day! Thank you so so much for watching my channel and giving me your feedback!
If you are just about to start a blog, I have a free 7-day online course for you.
Check out the link up there and in the description below this video, and sign up for this course,
and I'll send you instructions and video tutorials via email to help you get started
with your blog and also, very importantly, in one of the lessons I'll explain to you exactly
how you can make money with your blog. I'm pretty sure you are starting a blog not just for fun
but to actually make money with it, right? So sign up for my free course to get your blog started
the right way! Check the links there and there! You need to also understand something about
blogging these days. It's not just a blog in itself that can make you money. A blog,
and content marketing are great tools for growing any other business.
You could be an interior designer and start a blog covering your niche and through the
content on your blog you could find a ton of clients for your business. So the blog could
make you money with ads and affiliate products, but on top of it, you can use it strategically
to get people into your email list and then funneling them into becoming your customers.
Over 10 years ago I used to work as an editor and translator for an online magazine
that covered all things related to search engine optimization, SEO and you know what
kind of business financed this magazine? Our editorial team, we all were literally
employees of an SEO agency. It later became one of the leading digital marketing agencies
in the country. They used this online magazine to promote their agency indirectly, by inviting their
professionals and experts to write guest posts, do interviews and of course, the company names were
always mentioned. Also, our magazine organized industry conferences, we indirectly helped the SEO
agency find contacts with the best specialists of the industry and it helped their HR team as well.
We were educating the market about SEO, we were building trust with potential clients.
They would find out through our magazine about this SEO thing, they'd understand it
was quite difficult and they'd eventually find through our magazine that they can
hire our SEO agency to do this work for them. No one else on the market understood why they are
paying full-time salaries to keep an editorial and this magazine couldn't make any profits for the
first 3-4 years because we kept growing the team and couldn't make enough ad dollars even to cover
our salaries. But this online magazine or essentially the content marketing department
was totally worth it for the SEO agency and for growing their main business.
Sorry I went into all these details maybe I could give you another example, on a less techy
market. If you are a nutritionist and want to find yourself more clients, probably it would be smart
to start a blog about healthy eating habits. And you could educate your audience through
your articles, then maybe them send informative emails. If you do this first, they will be better
prepared to trust you with their health, right? So again, I get your worries. I know it's not
easy for an average person to invest hours upon hours of work upfront in a blog,
maybe for about a year or so, before you see any financial reward for this work.
Blogging is not the same as getting yourself a new job and getting paid from the first month.
This is why I personally don't recommend anyone to start a blog
from a place where you are not financially stable. The best way to start it is as a side hustle and
work on it in your free time at least in the first year while keeping your old main income stream.
And another important factor is that I think you should have at least some level of interest in
the topic you are going to cover in your blog. You know there are some niches that can make
you higher profits and faster. You can watch my other video where I made a review of the best and
most profitable blogging niches. I'll give you a link up there and in the description below.
But when you pick one of the niches, it's not enough for it to be profitable. You should also
enjoy researching more info on this topic and creating content on it. If you don't enjoy it,
you will likely give up too early before you see your first $1000 from the blog.
If you want to learn more actionable things about building a blog, you can open my site this tab
​​anastasiablogger.com/blogging and you will find so much more information about
specific strategies that I use to grow my blog. And just to remind you again, if you are about
to start your blog, I have a free 7-day course waiting for you, all the links are up there and
in the description below this video. Before you leave this page, I've manually
picked for you a few of my other videos that will help you grow your blog audience and
make more money with it. Check them here and there, and I'll see you in the next videos!