The Blogosphere is Stalling – How You Can Avoid Succumbing

While Internet users have been rising rapidly over the past few years, it seems blogs have not kept up. Sure, there’s been tons of new blogs, but it seems for every new blog that started up, another one died. Thus, in the same one year period, the number of blogs tracked by Technorati (such as this one) have stayed nearly the same.

I’m going to guess this is due to the:

• Emergence of spam blogs, and the subsequent realization that spam blogging isn’t really worth it (abandoned)
• Darwinian nature of blogging (see next paragraph)

Blogging is all about visibility. People blog because they want to be heard. If nobody is hearing you, then you might feel less inclined to update, which in turn would cause your blog to go inactive. Thus, I’d speculate that a small sliver of blogs out there have virtually all of the traffic, making it highly discouraging for new-comers. That, and most people are shitty writers, so they automatically get weeded out. 😛

The number is staying constant because it represents X + Y, where X is the constant “elite” bloggers who are around month after month, and Y are all of the people who try and fail to get market share. Y is the revolving door of bloggers. At least, that’s my take on this.

This also tells me that people who blog aren’t in it for the right reasons. 🙂 After a year, they give up if they aren’t gaining readers.

Here’s my advice for bloggers who aren’t doing it just to vent steam:

1. Pick a niche
2. Blog about it, a lot
3. Write original content; as in, don’t just link other blogs because then you’re bleeding visitors to the places you link without gaining any readers yourself.
4. You will eventually get search traffic
5. Figure out which posts get the most hits, and blog about related topics more
6. Critically assess your writing to improve it and make it more eye-catching
7. Don’t write about things that a stranger can’t follow (like, say, your relationships)
8. Promote your RSS feed 😉

My niche is not just tech news; I also try to cater to programmers. My most popular posts are an even split between my predictions (such as about Google or Apple) and JavaScript tips. Most of my search traffic relates to JavaScript, but most of my subscribers seem to be interested more in the news posts. 🙂

What’s your niche?