By Jack Krier
Blogs are dead. Long live blogging.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard or read this statement.
Everything is video now. No one reads blogs anymore. As such, everybody needs to start a Youtube channel.
That’s the word on the street. The numbers, however, tell a different story.
In 2019, there were over 600 million blogs in the world.
In this context, bloggers publish over 5.7 million posts every day, according to Internet Live Stats. Every month, 78 million new articles see the light on WordPress alone. And these numbers will continue growing, especially since much of the developing world is only discovering the phenomenon.
So, if there are still so many people blogging, why do people say that blogs are dead?
Well, blogging has changed a lot over the last 20 years.
I started my first ever blog — now defunct — around 2012. I experimented with various niches, bought and sold several blogs, and built a total of ten websites in the last few years. I’ve made a living with blogging and freelance writing for three years now, and I can safely say that traditional blogs are dead.
In other words, 2010 blogs are dead. If you want to get traffic and make a living blogging, you need a blog for the 2020s.
On this basis, here is what the future of blogging looks like.
Straightforward and helpful content that answers questions
The first primary shift concerns the content that works these days.
When I started blogging in 2012, people were just discovering SEO. Ranking techniques and keyword research were mystical concepts that only a select few bloggers applied. Most bloggers focused on producing fun and fascinating posts, but they didn’t worry much about answering the internet’s questions.
Today, SEO is part of any business model — no matter if it’s a travel blog or a restaurant. And that’s no surprise. Google is trying to serve a record number of users an exact answer to a simple question. Google has also gotten much more sophisticated in showing the best possible matches.
Consequently, traditional blog posts like “my three days in Amsterdam” are dead. If you write a post that doesn’t provide a razor-sharp solution to a clear-cut question, your article will float in endless internet nirvana.
Do this instead: invest in an SEO tool like Keysearch right from the get-go. Before blogging randomly about yourself, focus on having lots of blog posts that answer your niche’s burning questions. The more helpful, well-optimized content you have, the more Google will see you as an authority and push your blog up the ladder.
