Sue Reynolds — August 23, 2019 — August 23, 2019
In a recent article by Vox about the acquisition of Tumbler by WordPress, I was surprised to learn that the experts interviewed feel that blogging for business and marketing, particularly on WordPress, is “quaint and “feels like 100 years ago.”
Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and one of the first employees of WordPress’s old-school blogging competitor LiveJournal, told Vox that while a return to a discussion of “blogs” feels quaint, WordPress and Tumblr actually have a lot in common. “Social media moves so fast that talking about ‘blogs’ feels like 100 years ago, even though their heyday was barely more than a decade ago,” Dash said.
Has blogging gone to the dogs? Here are my thoughts on the subject of blogging for business and marketing, right here on my quaint WordPress blog.
Blogging for Business and Marketing: A Research Study
Blogging has come a long way since its first appearance in 1990. And I know I know, the current mantra continues to be “no one wants to read blogs anymore, they just want video.” But blogging can, if done correctly, provide a valuable boost to your website and establish you as an expert in your niche. It can help you get local rankings organically and provide content for your social media audience.
Recently on one of the many brands my team manages, we, with the assistance of talented SEO strategists, wrote an SEO optimized blog on WordPress that landed on page one, position two for our keywords, outranked only by our page on the same topic, in Google’s SERP in one day. ONE DAY. The intent of the blog was to be a helpful and useful resource for a niche audience of dog and cat show coordinators.
How did we do that? We researched what people are searching for now. We researched the topic extensively. We had to know our audience. We identified where our content would be helpful and useful, and meet a need not currently being addressed by other blogs. Then we wrote around 1400 words on the topic, with optimized headers, content, and images.
Now that we have a solid, researched blog in place ranking for local keywords, we will continuously promote it on social as part of our content strategy to inform and educate our audience.
Bonus: We will put puppies on everything.
Despite our own success, I still decided to do an extremely scientific study of the thoughts of blogging today by asking my peers what they thought.
When I took to social media and asked the question, “do you think blogging has become “quaint and out of date” to both my Twitter followers and to a Facebook group of social media marketing professionals, out of a total of 77 respondents, 68 said no, blogging is not quaint.
Twitter poll! Do you consider blogging to be “quaint and out of date?” #WednesdayThoughts
— Sue Reynolds (@suereynolds) August 14, 2019
That’s 88%
In one particularly eloquent and thoughtful Facebook response, Lena Katz of Variable Content, noted that
“The entertainment industry bet big on Tumblr at its inception, and they missed the mark. They thought it was going to be the next big thing in social media. Turns out, Snapchat and Instagram were much bigger. So, yeah, Tumblr blogs have become quaint and out-of-date by meme universe standards, but blogging for SEO purposes is a whole different animal and probably much more effective than posting on Instagram or Twitter. It’s kind of amazing how businesses in so many different professional industries (dentistry, car detailing, home mortgages) have become industry-renowned because someone there happened to have a knack for blogging.
I do think that mom blogs, fashion and style blogs, and wellness blogs have all kind of smooshed together into one massive oversaturated, low-value mega-category where most bloggers don’t know how to write or provide a professional service & are just trying to start a SAHM direct sales income stream. They all seem to be selling courses and ebooks, and they also all seem to “own a business” selling essential oils or makeup. Maybe that’s the “outdated and quaint” blog world. But in that case, I move that the hustle-bros attempting to sell me a course via page-long Facebook ads are also out-of-date.”
Brilliant.
So there you have it. Blogging for business and marketing in 2019 is still a thing.
Maybe “quaint” is in the eye of the beholder.
Maybe I just need to pet some puppies for awhile.
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