Is blogging becoming hard work? This was a question I was asked recently by Mandy Mortimer on Snapchat and it’s one worth thinking about.
When I first started blogging there weren’t many of us out there. Blogging hadn’t become an industry or something people considered an income stream. Yes, there were people making money from blogging but most people I knew did it for the love of it, to share snippets of their lives.
The blogging landscape has changed. I blog to promote my business but many more are blogging with the goal of making an income. Blogging has become more accessible and that means more people are doing it. But blogging is hard work, it always has been but there are benefits too.
Blogging is hard work but is it worth it? Watch below to find out what I think:
There have been some big changes for bloggers recently:
1. Google started cracking down on review and sponsored posts.
When you post a link to a site in your blog post you are telling Google that it’s a source of good information. The number of links a site or page gets is one signal that tells Google if a site is authoritative.
However, Google doesn’t want people to game the search results by either by sponsoring content or offering free product to review. As a result, Google has clamped down on review posts, asking bloggers to use ‘nofollow’ links in these articles.
Find out more about this new policy here.
2. Google introduced AMP short for ‘Assisted Mobile Pages’.
These are stripped down versions of the pages and posts on your website that will load really fast o mobile. Because they load fast they will appear higher in search results.
That’s sounds good doesn’t it? Before you decide to enable them there are a few things to consider. In order to produce fast loading pages, stuff needs to be stripped out. This includes ads, banners, social sharing buttons, comments and sign-up forms.
After listening to Michael Stelzner’s podcast on the topic I’m still unsure when I’ll take the plunge.
3. Facebook introduced Instant articles.
Similar to AMP these will load super fast but the content will live within the architecture of Facebook rather than your site.
This means that people will not be visiting your site but just a version of your post on Facebook. Will this have an adverse effect on conversions?
Find out more about Facebook Instant Articles here.
The answer then is yes, blogging is becoming hard work but is that a bad thing?
Mark Schaefer coined the term ‘Content Shock’. As content has become easier to create there is more of it out there. We have to fight to be seen. If blogging becomes harder, if we have to think harder about the choices and decisions we make that can only be a good thing for those who work hard.
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