Thanks to one of our subscribers for the heads up on this excellent article on blogging posted today on the Wall Street Journal titled “Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!”. It’s not long and I suggest you read it. I couldn’t even begin to cover all of it here. Basically, the author, Jason Fry starts out talking about all the recent main stream media articles that suggest that the blogging “fad” is fading. As it regards that he has this to say:
Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.
My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening: One of the chief problems with some chronicles of blogging’s demise is their confusion about definitions, a confusion that’s mirrored in efforts to measure blogs’ popularity or to say anything that can apply to bloggers as a group.
He makes another good point in talking about the fallacy in thinking that blog popularity should be measured by how many in-coming links there are from other sites. Amen to that. Although AgWired is linked to on a number of websites, out traffic has grown consistently and our visitors come to us directly (almost 98%) instead of from links on another website. Links are fine but we don’t judge our success by that measure. I like to think that our visitors desire to come here on their own, bookmarking the site and telling their friends and colleagues who then do the same. I love WOMA!
Blogging will not go away. I am not at all surprised to hear that most blogs don’t survive long (about 10% do). How many businesses last more than 1 year? BTW. ZimmComm is just about to celebrate its second anniversary. Oh yeah. Oh and BTW. Since we got into this blogging thing at the end of the first year, our revenue has doubled year over year. Oh yeah again. Blogging and podcasting are tools that the savvy marketer will recognize and use to their advantage. They aren’t meant to be an exclusive strategy. They are part of a very successful one.