Search Concepts

Posted by Search Concepts on August 6th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media |

Whatever other people may be saying, blogging is a big part of our lives today. We owe this to the huge advancement in Internet technology that we have experienced over the past decade. The Internet landscape today is full of websites that are basically blogs. Whatever their niche—political, entertainment, technology, etc—blogs have been the primary medium where people can get information about current events and trends.

Blogs and Dollars

Although the Internet is rife with millions of blogs today, being at the top of the blogging world is still reserved for just the chosen few. These pioneers of the blogosphere have been in the business for so long that they have had their own innovations that have changed the over-all blogging landscape. Websites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, and Perez Hilton have dominated their various blogging niches for many years now.

Blogging as a way of life has become a way for many people to voice out their opinions ad experiences to the world. But today, blogs and bloggers have become so much more that a medium, they have become legitimate businesses where people can actually make a decent living out of. Many blogs that started as personal start-ups have become widely syndicated that they eventually became companies themselves employing staff to keep their operations running.

Blogging’s Influence Today

Here are some of the ways blogs have transformed over the years:

• Blogs for Businesses

As has been mentioned, many developers have already made millions out of their blogs. Blogs are a perfect platform for web advertising, especially if your blog has many followers and is on top of its SEO market.

Mashable was just a start-up personal blog when CEO Pete Cashmore posted his first entry. Today, blogs number about 14 million all over the world in different languages. The growth of the blogosphere is said to be going at a rate of 80,000 per day! Today, many companies, from multi-national ones to the local ones, have set up their own blogs in order to penetrate more easily to their customers. Blogs are modern and youthful. Businesses understand that they have to incorporate blogging to their strategies in order to maximize their customer reach.

Aside from these, businesses now make actual money through their blogs. Annual income of some established bloggers today can actually amount up to $42,000, not a bad keep for working with your PC at home.

• Blogs as Social Media Tools

Over the years, people have increasingly turned to the Internet to get their updates of current events from all over the world. They also turn to the Web for research and to find resources they can use to aid in their work or school life. Most notable of all these developments is the fact that blogs have become a social media tool people use to push their advocacies to the consuming public.

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, and others are trending nowadays because of the social factor that they enable their users to feel. Blogs are the same. There’s probably no faster way to spread information than by using the Internet and blogs as your social media tool.

• Blogs as the Newest Source for News

There was a time when it was unthinkable for us to get our updates of daily events anywhere but from a television set or radio. Today, breaking news literally means breaking news as it is delivered right off the bat by news companies through their blogs. Minutes after an event happened or even during the time a major event is happening, we already get updates in the blogosphere. Blogs and the Internet have made us a more informed world and they have encouraged people to get updated with what’s happening to their surroundings.

A Little History of the Blogging World

There have been a lot of events over the past decade that has led to the blogosphere landscape of today. Numerous developments have helped shape the industry as we know it today. There’s Arianna Huffington and her $2.5 million investment to set up the now famous Huffington Post in 2005. Huffington post started from this initially and has now become one of the most popular blog in the whole Web.

Federated Media was also launched in 2005. It is one of the first firms to focus on blogs, more specifically advertising through blogs. The investments this company made has helped numerous start-up blogs get the much-needed capital to keep their sites running.

According to Steve Spalding, founder of the blog “How to Split an Atom,” said that “As [blogs] kept making more content, they kept appearing in Google and kept getting linked to by bigger and better sites, which lead to more traffic, more relevance, more links and most importantly, more money.” The blogs that have obtained more investments and continued to post excellent content are the ones that have raced ahead of their competition.

Another important event in the history of the blogosphere is the rise of WordPress. WordPress.com was a free hosting blogging service that enabled anyone to set up their very own blogs easily. Today, over 25 million users are using WordPress, resulting to an average of a billion page views per month. Tumblelogs, the most popular of which was Tumblr, also generated enough push to move the blogging word forward.

Looking Forward

Blogs will surely be around for many years to come. With technology ever advancing, there are plenty of software and devices that have already been introduced to encourage people to blog away! The Internet has given every individual a certain sense of power that almost anyone, no matter the age or educational attainment, can type out their opinions and share them to the world.

For the past decade, the rise of the blog has been an amazing thing. It started out as a way for people to type in their thoughts and events of the day. Now it has transformed into a worldwide phenomena that has the capability to change lives wherever you may be in the world.

Tags: blogging, Blogspot, CMS, Social Media, WordPress

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