Posts tagged social networks

I’ve been searching recently to answer a question that many who are considering new online programs have asked: Just how many blogs are there, anyway?

Let us start by saying that hard, reliable data is difficult to find! Many of the services or engines that track individual blogs, especially Google, don’t share their information. Even for those that do share data, it’s still impossible to know if their lists are all-inclusive, or how many “dead” and zombie, or “sleeping” blogs they contain.

“Dead” means just what you probably think it means – the blog has been permanently abandoned or discontinued. Unfortunately, this is the fate of many blogs.

Zombie or “sleeping” blogs are terms I just made up, because they seem to fit so nicely – blogs that are temporarily dormant, but will be revived by their owners at some point in the future.

So, you want a number, right?

Well, the current estimates say there are about 450 million “active” English language blogs right now, but that number varies according to the source. Technorati estimated over 200 million blogs at the start of 2009, with exponential growth since then.

Of course these numbers change every day however, as new blogs are started by the thousands (or tens of thousands) every day, and a large number of blogs have also reached the point of where they could be defined as “abandoned” and should be subtracted. When including non-English in the total number, especially those in Chinese Mandarin, and there may be over one billion blogs worldwide.

This equates to 1 out of every 6 people in the world with a personal blog!

This is often because many business blogs, those written by small business owners or others who are responsible for specific company blogs discover that finding topics to write about, finding the time to actually write the posts, upload them, and adhering to an established publishing schedule is a lot harder than it seems at first.

This is often the point where blog copywriters or other marketing freelancers are asked to step in and help with writing services, at least by those companies who (wisely!) wish to continue with the benefits that are being generated by their blog. The fact is that blogs – especially those that have been around for a while – can generate significant SEO value and traffic to businesses and their websites…and allowing them to become “abandoned” in the eyes of Google or other search engines (and therefore no longer relevant in rankings) is quite a shame!

(If you find yourself in this situation, take just a moment and visit our blog management page to see how we can help keep your blog active, so it continues to generate the valuable traffic to your website.)

How many people read or follow all these blogs?

This question is just as difficult to answer, because once again there is no reliable tracking mechanism. But certainly we are talking about many hundreds of  millions of people, maybe 500 or 600 million total . If you include non-English blogs again, we can easily assume a number well above a billion people (remember, there might be a billion bloggers!) perhaps even more than 2 billion – or about 1 out of every 3 human beings on the planet.

With such a massive number of worldwide readers, it should go without saying that an active blog can be absolutely VITAL to establishing a strong web presence for your company or brands.

Blogging also allows you to regularly share “fresh” content, the kind that has become key to solid search engine rankings from Google, Bing and other search engines…whose web crawlers are constantly seeking out and indexing new content.

Your blog is also a great source of fodder to utilize in social media like company Facebook, Twitter and other networks.

In fact, it can be hard to conduct a social media campaign without a blog, with the other alternative being the addition of new stand-alone pages to your website.

Why is this? Facebook updates you are limited to 440 characters; Twitter only allows 140. There simply aren’t enough characters to communicate many marketing messages, detailed special events, sales promotions or educational content. This type of long form information is best shared via your blog (or through another page on your site, as noted), and then shared through your various social media platforms.

With so many blogs already, you might ask “should I even bother with my own?”

Your answer should be… Yes!

Sure every niche has a few very popular A-List bloggers. Guy Kawasaki comes to mind right away in the field of communication technology. John Mauldin is another, this time in the financial analysis and investment category. And Chad Ochocinco is one of the many popular athletes that are on Twitter and Facebook as well as blogging regularly.  There are many (many!) others in every field or industry you can name.

But because of the low barriers to entry, almost anyone can begin blogging. And even those who don’t have the time and resources to blog themselves can still hire firms like ours to help them develop their own ideas and voice.

And as noted, some of the blogs that exist today won’t exist tomorrow.

So if you stick to your blogging plan, eventually you will gain on your competitors just through perseverance!

This means there are many voices, and while certainly not everyone will achieve A-List status, each one can attract its own share of attention, and contribute to the ongoing conversation which is the web today.

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Need Help With Your Next Writing Project?

Contact me directly at: jhaynes@hattrickassociates.com, call (314) 494-3494

or visit our Contact page and fill out the brief form.

Jim

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