Blogging has changed over the years, growing from the moderated newsgroups and the popular but obsolete mod.ber forum that was characterized by posting summaries of discussions from Usenet. Ever since then, the world of blogging has changed so rapidly, it has become diverse and more popular in the recent years. Currently, blogging is a well-known and respected marketing tool that is used by businesses. This has brought about more businesses to use blogging as a way of reaching their customer base.
Let us now look at how blogging has changed.
Kola Adesina knows that blogging is growing at a very fast pace, and he advises those who are new to it or those who have been blogging for years to be attentive to the current trends and adapt to this present dynamic field.
Application of visual content
Today, you have to include visuals in your blog content. Years ago, blogs only used to take a stock photo and place it in the content somewhere in the post. And during that time, most blogs never had images at all.
As social media has become the central point of communication between people and businesses, visual content has become a more prominent tool. Adding to the short attention span of the audience, visual content is a much more effective way of reaching your audience through social media.
Promotion of content is paramount
Ten years ago, it was easy to attract people and build an audience, that concept does not work today. Content marketing has grown over the years and this has also risen the amount of information that we can tap. It is hard to stand out in this noisy world which is loaded with big data. That is why you need to promote your content through blogging and even when you are marketing your content.
Social media and email marketing have become powerful content promotion vehicles, but now, companies are using pay per click campaigns and social media advertising to promote their content.
Blog posts have grown longer and more in-depth
Its a paradox when you think about the short attention span of readers but the length of the content is rising. Blogging used to contain short content with an average of about 700 words. Nowadays, blog content goes up to 900 words.
Since competition is tough, it is worth it to be the resource of a particular topic. It is rewarding to have more content on a certain topic, for the reader to have valuable information. That is why long content has better benefits from SEO since it provides answers to questions that people are asking.
Social is the new platform for conversations
Although there are blogs which have a decent community behind them, most blogs have decided to disable the comments on their blogs. For those who have active comments on their blogs, they are not seeing the volume they used to see years ago. Why has it changed? Among the reasons, blog scam and the time needed to manage a blog community is one of the reasons as to why comments should be turned off; this is because most of the conversations are happening on social media.
Content goes where there are people
Kola Adesina also advises that blogs need to have a “home base”, and that is why you should always have a blog or a website that you own. It is increasingly difficult to be noticed and attract more people to view your blog. Social media platforms want you to be glued to their platforms, and this makes it easier for people to easily publish on their sites. For instance, Facebook prioritizes your News Feed using sticky-content that takes some time to consume. Twitter uses Medium as a publishing platform and LinkedIn publishes articles on their platform. This is a major reason as to why people are now publishing where people are.