There have been a number of articles published recently stating the newest trend in technology is the end of the blog. The stories talk about how corporate blogging has fallen from close to 50% in 2010, to about 37% last year. Other stories have talked about how only ¼ of Fortune 500 companies blog. These various stories talk about how companies are abandoning their blogs in favor of Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest. Saying the reduction in blogs is the end of blogging is the same as saying the rapid loss in visitors to MySpace spelled the end for social media.
There are several fallacies involved in decreeing the end of the blog. First, there are over 158 million blogs on the “internets”. You are reading one now. You are also reading one if you ever go online to look at the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, TMZ, Engadget, Mashable, The Daily Beast, or Gawker. Hubspot found that companies who actually blog (versus companies that just have blogs) increase their leads between 67% and 88% depending on whether the company is B2B or B2C (respectively).
Why are so many companies abandoning their blogs? It turns out most of those who have given up on blogging have done so because it actually involves work. Just having a blog doesn’t cut it. Do you think that just putting in the newest hot product will suddenly double your sales, or might you have to actually work at promoting your business as carrying that hot new product?
Where are people going who are giving up on their blogs? They are moving to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. The funny thing is, the same lack of effort writing a regular blog post won’t make your Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest page a success. You would no more run one radio ad and if the people didn’t stream into your business conclude radio to be a dead medium. As with any marketing effort, frequency is the key.
People are also forgetting one of the main reasons most businesses want to blog. While it would be nice to have a thousand plus readers to my blog, I don’t expect it and don’t write for that. I write a regular blog for my site so that Google and other search engines find me and list my new page in their indexes. Over time, all those blog post and pages add up and bring new visitors to my site day after day, week after week, month after month. If you don’t have the time to blog, hire someone who does. We write blogs for several dozen businesses on a regular basis. So too do other web marketing firms. There is no magic pill to make anyone tall, skinny, or beautiful/handsome. There are no magic beans to the fabled castle in the sky. There is no magic shortcut to internet success other than hard work.
