Threads
Bluesky
Mastodon
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Linktr.ee/nevillehobson
, , , , , , , ,

The future of blogging is rosy

By

Neville Hobson

•

Read my blogBack in the day when blogging was social media, in the decade of the 00s, you were pretty limited in the methods you could use to publish your thinking and ideas.

Then, you only had blogs, the websites that enabled anyone with a thought to create a web page (a post) and publish it. But those websites and those who blogged kick-started a near-revolution in how people expressed themselves and who did that self-expressing.

That time is epitomized in Hugh MacLeod’s “Read my blog” cartoon from 2005.

Today, the blogging landscape has changed radically, with myriad tools and channels that offer platforms for you to to create and communicate something online in ways that not only present words (and audio, video) to others to read and maybe comment on, but also potentially reach audiences that exceed the circulations of traditional printed newspapers.

Today, your content is shared, discussed, criticized, praised, retweeted, repurposed, plagiarised, republished, and otherwise spread far and wide – yet the chain of links usually connects everything back to your original thoughts.

So what do others think about blogging, what it offers you, and where it’s going?

Recently, my friend Stephen Waddington – @wadds to his legion friends, fans and followers online – emailed a group of his friends to ask them about the future of blogging, and to share the benefits they’d experienced from blogging.

That ask has resulted in a 27-page ebook that Stephen edited and published yesterday entitled “The business of blogging.”

It contains short essays from bloggers Richard Bailey, Heather Baker, Stuart Bruce, Judy Gombita, Andrew Grill, Neville Hobson, Chris Lake, Rich Leigh, Rachel Miller, Mat Morrison, Lee Odden, Dan Slee, Heather Yaxley, and Philip Young.

It’s a terrific collection of experiences and future thinking from people who have been blogging for business for years, a worthy reference/source of inspiration if you’re thinking about blogging or would like to be inspired by what others have done.

Here’s the full table of contents:

INTRODUCTION

01 Welcome to the Business of Blogging | Stephen Waddington

BUSINESS

02 A Building Block for Business | Lee Odden
03 A Shop Window to the World | Stuart Bruce
04 Building a Network and a Business | Rachel Miller

COMMUNITY

05 Thinking, Connecting, and Sharing | Dan Slee
06 Blogging with a PR-Specific and Global Mindset | Judy Gombita
07 Building and Serving a Community Better Than Mainstream Media | Rich Leigh

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

08 Your Start with Blogging | Neville Hobson
09 Open and Transparent Thinking | Mat Morrison
10 Reasons to Keep Blogging | Heather Yaxley
11 A Career Development and Personal Reputation Platform | Andrew Grill

THE FUTURE OF BLOGGING

12 Blogging Reframed | Richard Bailey
13 Creation, Curation and Community | Philip Young
14 Excellence is Hard to Find | Heather Baker
15 The Evolution of Blogging | Chris Lake

Read it right here or download it from Slideshare:

[slideshare id=31261270&doc=thebusinessofblogging-140216073646-phpapp02&type=d&w=540&h=700]

As Stephen notes in his introduction to the ebook,

[…] The business of blogging involves learning, professional and
personal development, networking and profile. It is evolving but for those individuals and organisations that are prepared to invest the effort it has a strong future.

Spot on.

My contribution includes some thinking that I’ve written about in this blog recently, especially these six steps to get started:

  1. Blogging is about the content not the platform. The primary point is your content not where it’s published.
  2. You’re telling a story not writing a press release or a sales brochure. Write informally, conversationally, avoiding jargon, and with passion.
  3. Be selfless and generous in your references to others. Attribute, cite, link.
  4. Disclose any conflict of interest. If in doubt, always disclose.
  5. Make your content eminently shareable. Eg, enable sharing buttons, make your headline concise enough that it’s simple to tweet it. Make the place your content is published on easy to use: a blog, in other words, not a corporate website.
  6. Be clear on your strategy and the measurable goal you wish to achieve. This is all about clear business intent.

“The business of blogging” is a great resource you should download right now.

58 responses to “The future of blogging is rosy”

  1. Steve avatar
    Steve

    Very nice. My blog’s been treading water largely because of my half-assed approach to it. Time to kick it up. Reading these views will help.

  2. Carmen Brooks avatar
    Carmen Brooks

    For me, blogging is like having a friend where you can say whatever you want and will listen to you. This is also a great way to learn from other people’s experiences and knowing their opinion on something that no one can say to you. Thru blogging I was able to know about self improvement and put it to practice. This is a great way to socialize as well.

  3. Larry avatar
    Larry

    The most important thing i have done in the last five years was to create my blog. It allowed me to share my passions, re-quaint myself with my self belief, and allowed me to go on and build an online business. I would say the most important thing to learn is write from the heart because that’s where great content will come from. Be authentic and then amazed at how others react.

  4. Where is Your B2B Blog? | B2B Voices

    […] In case you missed the news, the blog turned 20 years old this year. That’s pretty significant since many of us are still working on our Twitter and Instagram strategies and both of those platforms are less than ten years old. And the blog is far from dead as Neville Hobson points out, in fact, it’s future looks pretty good. […]

Hello, and

Welcome

Prime Topics

ALL TOPICS

Latest 5 Posts

Podcasts

FIR Interviews

Blogroll

Vuelio Top 10 Blog 2024
CC BY-SA