Well, I think this post is pretty important. We’ve heard a lot of concerns over the last several months about the future of blogging, and content marketing.
And realistically, we share a lot of these concerns. They’re unknowns about the future.
Today what we want to do is we want to go through a lot of these concerns and address them and talk about why it is that we’re still excited about the future of blogs.
So let’s take this one by one.
Navigating Uncertainty: The Future of Blogs
The first concern we’ve heard a lot over the last year has been just a lot of Google updates that have decimated a lot of people’s traffic.
Just seems like Google is not really on our team.
You put so much time and so much effort into your website and then Google takes half your traffic.
In one day, half your traffic is gone.
That is a significant problem. And something that you definitely should be concerned about when you lose out of your traffic.
The reality is Google is actually getting harder and harder to game.
As it’s traditionally known, search engine optimization is struggling realistically, but content creation isn’t.
We have websites that are just not seeing these traffic hits because we’re focusing on creating helpful content, unique content, And that’s still been extremely effective.
Adapting to Change: Blogging Trends and the Future
Despite Google making updates, honestly, I think say what you will about Google and what you think about them as a company and what they’re trying to do.
But I actually think that realistically, they’re trying to provide the best content they can for people when they do their search.
They want to make a good product for their customers. And I actually think that aligns pretty well with what we’re trying to do.
Something really closely related to Google updates is the rise to the top of the ranking page of big company websites or larger brands.
A lot of small creators are really concerned that their content just won’t be able to rank, and that Google is really favoring these big websites.
The Intersection of AI and Blogging: What Lies Ahead in future of blogging
While we all definitely see that, I honestly think that a few specific examples are probably driving a lot of that fear.
So we do see this, right? You’ve seen this.
How can you compete when there’s somebody big in your niche? What we’ve seen is that Google is really trying to make sure that the content that they’re providing is accurate.
And so building up authority in your niche is important. But there are a lot of ways to do that.
You don’t have to be the biggest company. In fact, all the big companies and all the big websites once started out small, too.
But what we do have to do is we have to look at what factors show Google that we’re reputable.
Future of blogging Blogs in the Age of ChatGPT: What's Changing
There are so many things to do to improve our EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.) score with Google,
and one of them is simply just the content itself and making sure that we create enough of it and that we cover the topics that we’re covering in-depth and don’t just be superficial.
Reliability in the Blogosphere: Are Blogs Still Trustworthy?
The next big concern that a lot of people have right now is just really high competition.
This comes from, first of all, years of people knowing that this is somewhere you could come to make a good, fairly passive side income.
Future Blogging Trends
It also has been exacerbated by AI because people can literally just produce hundreds of articles in the blink of an eye. And the reality here is there are a few things we need to consider.
The Impact of Future Blogging After AI and ChatGPT
Number one, more content doesn’t necessarily mean really higher competition. We talked about authority, people who create commodity content, something that an AI could generate on its own,
It’s content that’s not well interlinked, it’s content that doesn’t go in-depth on a topic, and it doesn’t build any real authority.
The majority of that content doesn’t get any real traffic because it doesn’t do well in search.
That’s because you’re not being a blogger. You are being a content machine that literally uses a machine to make content and then posts it.
The Future of Work Blog
Well, people who use AI-generated content, will have some success because content on the internet, even really poorly done content will have some amount of success.
But now where AI is a lot more mainstream, people are concerned a lot more about it because more people are doing it.
If the owner of that website doesn’t go in and significantly improve and add original value to those articles, they just don’t perform as well.
Another aspect of the competition is the legitimate competition. There are a lot more websites and there’s a lot more content today than there was 10 years ago or even five years ago.
The Future of Blogging After ChatGPT and AI Integration
When you’re considering what you want to do online, if you’re blogging, and creating content, you’re thinking about what’s my niche. What can I do?
You have a couple of options, and what most people tend to do is they do what they saw worked for other people. it’s an easy path to guarantee that you will make very little money.
Find something that is reasonably unique. And deal with the real competition, not the mass-produced.
This isn’t to say that you just totally shouldn’t use AI. AI is a tool. There are some people who have taken AI and they use it in every aspect of their business.
That’s not something that I would do because it’s just not the right fit for every business task that I need to do.
But it’s not this horrible thing that you should totally stay away from. You should use it if it’s helpful, but that’s the key. Use it in a way that’s actually helpful and provides real value.
future of blogging
The other thing, which is a huge fear for some people, is that nobody’s going to go to my blog post anymore because they’re just going to ask AI.
I understand why people would feel that way. But what we’ve seen over and over and over again is disruptive technologies that people thought were going to do essentially just that.
People fought with Siri and Alexa, Siri and Alexa don’t do a very good job of answering the questions You ask.
Are Blogs Still Trustworthy?
So it’s a little bit better experience for the user. But I’m not seeing that it’s answering my question sufficiently for me to stop researching because I got three sentences that told me the answer.
The second part to this is that people are very slow to change their behavior.
Yes, they are. It is something that is actually a lot of times comical to see people how slow they are to adapt to new technology or new anything. Humans don’t like change.
In this case, where this is something that’s a pretty new technology, it’s going to be quite a while before it is really, really ingrained in people to start using it.
Think of the term, I’m going to go search something. We don’t even say that. We say, I’m going to go google something. We use that as a verb now.
That alone is just going to help, I don’t know if delay is the right word, but it’s just going to stretch that time when people start using AI.
I just think that especially during that time, it gives us opportunities to be very, very relevant.
Most people are not early adopters. Most people aren’t you. Most people aren’t me either.
And that’s something that we all need to understand is that if we make the assumption that everybody else behaves the way that we do, we’re probably not going to do very well in business.
Conclusion
All of these concerns that we’ve just addressed here, they’re all really valid.
I mean, these are all things like when you’re talking about starting a business, you would be stupid to not look at the things in your industry that are going to be of concern.
But you also have to look at the other side.
Also you have to look at the reasons to see if the benefits outweigh the doubts or the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, I should say.
We’ve identified some of the benefits of blogging and why it still makes sense to us.
Are Blogs Reliable? in the future of blogging
Whenever somebody says blogging is a stupid business. It’s very risky.
That just tells me that they either don’t understand blogging as a business or they don’t understand what risk actually means.
First of all, blogging has an extremely low financial barrier to entry. That’s part of the reason there’s so much competition.
No need to spend a bunch of money to build this business. What are your alternatives to creating another income for yourself, and for your family?
If you want to start a business that’s going to generate an income for you, in almost every case, you have to lay out a bunch of cash.
You can’t do multilevel marketing without laying out a bunch of cash.
The reality is, though, that most business opportunities that you’re going to find that have a realistic chance of making you a good income are going to require you to lay out a bunch of cash.
All You need a domain name and you need hosting.
You could probably get by with a free theme today because even the one that WordPress gives you has full-site editing now, and it’s not as good as some of the really good themes, but it works just fine.
Again ..You can make your website beautiful. You don’t need anything fancy to get started. I think that in and of itself is amazing.
