Blogging is dead. That's what I hear over and over from marketers. It's dead. It's worthless, there are over 900 billion blogs that nobody reads.
The facts are indeed true - most blogs suck, are not read, and do absolutely nothing for the people who create them beyond perhaps some esoteric psychological reinforcement.
But, there is much more to blogging than setting up WordPress and having at it.
When you think about it - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, are blogging platforms. Facebook you can share articles, cultivate content, and offer your opinion with that cultivation. With twitter, 140 (now more) characters of blogging of your life, your brand, your experiences. Instagram is the visual version of that fact.
These are the platforms that people are spending now HOURS a day in - consuming all types of content, and desperately avoiding any types of advertising. Why do you think people share 92 billion cat videos and not one single commercial produced by a Fortune 500 company?
Blogging is most certainly not dead. There is more to it than just setting up a WordPress site and writing. And let me also add for you that by and large, most "bloggers," are awful writers. Absolutely utterly awful.
What's worse - 99% of the marketers out there have no idea how to turn blogs into customers. People who are still blogging in the traditional way, by posting to their website, don’t know how to get people to come see what they are writing.
That's an unfortunate fact. They follow the "field of dreams" model - post it and hope to living crap they come.
They don't come.
To make blogging work (in any channel, including your own website), you have to know how to make people see what you've written - you have to write content worthy of being seen. Not to get all cray educational here, but, as Pliny the Elder says, "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read."
If you write a blog, social media needs to be the gateway drug to your content and site. You use the social networks to DRIVE traffic to your page - not the other way around. You don't want to put your best content on someone else's service.
Social networks, specifically Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, should be treated as the stepping stones of content to drive to the aforementioned “home,” whether that’s a blog or media site or whatever.
What has happened is that the attention graph is shifting. People’s willingness to jump somewhere to consume content is certainly not down, but their willingness to leave the platform they are already engaging on (Facebook, Twitter) is.
To get them to click, you have to be smart. Really smart. And that means basically mastering two things - knowing how to write good headlines, and better still, knowing how to write engaging blog content worthy of being read.
Don’t abandon the traditional blogging format; instead, test like crazy on social media and understand what drives your users, what your users care about.
Don't post GARBAGE. The "92 ways blah blah blah... #7 will shock the crap out of you," days are over. Make sure your content is really good once you get someone to click it or else consumers are going to be pretty upset they clicked at all and will probably never do so ever again.
In a world of “rented” social media space, having your own space (in your blog) to provide value to your community is beyond valuable - it's absolutely essential.
I’ve seen people shout and scream about the death of blogging while on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every other social blogging site which they’re posting content to every day.
That's blogging.
People need to reevaluate the context they use the word blog in, and understand the insane amount of blogging platforms that exist in today’s world. Each has their own value and may or may not speak to what you’re looking to accomplish.
Find your value and go all in with your content - but use social media to drive the traffic and most importantly own your empire.