Don’t freak, but blogging is dead. I wondered if that might be the case before I got to BlogHer. When I heard the announcement upon arrival that nearly 800 bloggers would be at the conference, I winced. When we stood up in the first session to do a “speed-dating” 30 second introduction to what ended up being about 12 people in the room, I knew it, in my gut. Blogging is dead. I met some (mostly mommy) bloggers, I got a handful of cards, and I sat back down. Nobody said anything that rocked my world. For the rest of the weekend I kept my eyes open for those bloggers I wanted to track in my mental blogroll (some of them were mommies). A handful caught my eye, but I received nearly 100 cards (how much like collecting yearbook signatures is collecting business cards?). The saturation point has been reached in blogging.
All the self-referential stuff got old over the weekend conference. I want to meet YOU, not your blog. I want to hear YOUR (remarkable) STORY and the people that told them best are the one’s whose blogs I’m reading now. Penelope Trunk is taking a beating over at Suburban Turmoil. You know what I think? She said a few crucial things during a session that pissed people off. In order to brand your blog you have to be able to cut the fat. Some people don’t want to cut the fat. Those blogs that can’t or won’t will suffer. That’s the essence of what I got from that session. It also hit home for me (and multiple speakers, not just Trunk, pointed this out–you have to have a focus. The tighter the niche, the better. Mommy bloggers have a unique voice and a niche, and they can tighten the focus if they so choose. I’m tightening mine. And lengthening my parenthetical asides to balance it all out.)
It’s been said before, blogging is dead, and I know it because I twitter more than I blog now. Despite this, I think it’s possible to continue to allow your blogging to emerge as part of your personal micro-brand. I own several small companies and despite this only just recently learned that *I* am a brand, too. That is, I am a sole propreiter, and so are you. The best way for me to sell or market myself is to be myself. Anyone asking about traffic or numbers or book deals wants to know, at the heart of it, how to market themselves. A blog is a piece. It is only a piece. Putting too much stock in a piece is suicide.
For those that have just started blogging, I’m sorry to let you know that you’re a late adopter. I started blogging more than four years ago at LiveJournal and back then, if you blogged, you were an anomaly *pats self on back.* And I’m also not the only one asking if blogging is dead. If I were your online adviser, I would give you this advice:
Diversify Your Portfolio
Get involved with a social network online. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Villij, Lijit, Flickr. My Techstar friends in Boulder are coming up with a dozen others that will soon launch. Meet others that share similar interests. Go ahead and sign up for all those things people have been pressuring you about. If you’re going to dip your toe in, you might as well plunge. Diversifying your portfolio is the best way to ensure your survival in this blog eat blog world.
As Our Dear Friend Penelope Says, Focus
Cut the fat. Create compelling, well-designed business cards. Take the time to choose a short, easy to spell URL and buy it. Buy 10 URLs. It’s like investing in real estate and the prices will only continue to go up. Buy now and buy right. Find your focus, buy the URL and stay true to whatever you choose. If it’s pencils, cool. If it’s mechanical, rainbow-colored, googly-eye monster-headed pencils, even better. Niche-marketing is the only way these days, in absolutely any market.
.Typepad & .Blogspot = .Unmemorable
Care enough about your blog and brand to create a memorable URL. Your name is a good place to start. If your name is unmemorable, consider a quality about yourself that is. That way when I get home and want to look you up I have a chance of finding you.
Give Up Expecting Traffic
The blogs, stories and people I love to read the most are the ones that seem to have no idea I’m reading them. Traffic is not a measure of how well you’re writing. Comments aren’t either. Write, blog or tell your stories for the sheer joy of unleashing your creativity. Just because blogging is dead doesn’t mean your writing has to be.
Dead or not, I found my way here because your “blog card” was the only one my three-year-old daughter wanted to bring home from BlogHer (she wuved you).
There is a picture of your shoe on my blog. Initially I couldn’t remember your name… but Faith had shoved your card inside my computer chip/credit card holder… the only safe place.
Glad you made it back home.
My opinion on this topic is that blogs can come and go - and as long as mine isn’t accidentally deleted by my (or some other fool’s) hand, I’m happy.
I just want Faith to know that I love her - and that I was a person before I was Mommy. I really wish my mom had journals or something that I could read through.. wouldn’t that be cool? Just think if we had something that went all the way back through our grandparents!
For what it’s worth - I don’t shove myself in the Mommyblogger category. I call it life.
It was great meeting you and now I have to get out of your comments. I can go on forever talking to myself.
la la la!!
Gwen this is the best thing I’ve read all day about blogging. I write with a group on my primary blog, but the advice you have given has rung true in regards in my current attempts to start my own blog.
1.I’ve been more obsessed with the money & traffic vs. the content
2. The domain name. You’re right. I’m going to shell out the moolah and buy several. Even blogger lets you use your own URL.
Anyway, I’ve poked around your sites and I must say you are an admirable woman–worldly & tech savvy.
I don’t know if I feel that blogging has jumped the shark, so to speak…but I do know that I haven’t felt much like doing it the last six months or so. I’d much rather spend time lately at MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, etc. (I do like Vox sometimes and there’s Ning, too.) I signed up for Facebook at the request of a friend, but I just don’t get the appeal of it. (Not to mention that the interface confuses me.) Having a hard time understanding why I’d want to see the backstory on every connection made–seems overly invasive and so, I don’t know, high school’ish. Maybe I’m just ready to put my time and energy into something beyond the standard TypePad/Blogger thing. (I’ve been blogging for 4 years.) I just know that lately plain old blogging (both posting and reading blogs) has seemed like a bit of a chore.
This is a really interesting post. But what does dead mean? I’m a editor at a magazine and all we ever hear is “magazines are dead” for pretty much my entire career in magazines. Our magazine started a blog…and now blogs are dead? I think that maybe for early adapters blogging may no longer be interesting, but for the great masses of people? I think it remains to be seen if they even become readers of blogs let alone bloggers. My guess is that it’s all just evolving. I didn’t go to blogher, but I’ve read about a million posts and I have to agree with the idea that I haven’t read anything that blew me away about direction things are going in or really new ways of thinking about things. Once the novelty of the experience wears off you really are just left with the hard cold fact: do you have something interesting to say that people what to hear? And have you found the right medium for your message? All this stuff about can a blog get you a book, or should you twitter or do this or that to me is really just avoiding that basic question. But really, I’m posting this comment because I really appreciate your thoughtfulness. I think the self referential stuff is getting pretty old too. I actually find it a little scary! (sorry for such a long comment)
Okay, let me see if I have your point:
Are you saying that blogging is dead because it is *common* and *mainstream?*
Or is it that there are newer avenues and everyone—or everyone worth anything (such as my valuable time reading)—has moved on to that other, newer technology such as twitter?
Why is it mutually exclusive?
I agree that it’s a bigger pond now than four years ago, or even two, when I began blogging. I also agree that it sounds like there were some real downs as well as ups at BlogHer.
But I disagree that blogging is dead.
I think, instead, that it has just begun to realize its potential. And perhaps people stuttered, trying to foist off answers, “how-tos” and “whats” in sessions because it is evolving.
Instead of tossing off trite “here’s what you do” perhaps we need to focus more on “what’s the potential here?”
There’s something here to harness and as with anything technological, you simply have to keep up with new avenues.
But you know what the Girl Scouts say about one is silver and the other gold.
That said, I think your advice is succinct, relevant and excellent…most particularly because I agree with copyblogger (referenced in your post).
I do think that now the pool is big the A-list stuff is less relevant.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. are simply new avenues for the blog. I re-host my blog in 5 other spaces, now. One is very niche.
I don’t consider this death..I consider it advanced life.
So you won’t catch me wearing black and playing a dirge just yet. ;)
Julie
Ravin’ Picture Maven
Four years is a long time? Heh.
I know people who were handcrafting blogs in 1997, including my ex.
I’m skeptical that blogging is dead, depending on what people thing “blogging” really is. If it is about making a living doing it by being one of the few and the proud, perhaps it is. If it is about being present online, I doubt it.
I’ll never use twitter myself. I tend to want to communicate longer thoughts than the fact that I’m in a meeting or going to lunch, which seems to be what twitter is for. Maybe I’m missing the point.
I did want to make an official request for you to turn on full RSS feeds. Your feeds for this new site are truncated, which means if the first 100 words or whathaveyou of the post look interesting, I have to leave my RSS reader to read the rest. For most blogs, when that happens, I don’t bother to do so. Robert Scoble commented on that same phenomena a couple of years ago so I know quite a few people feel that way. Full feeds are the way to go.
anyone who got in this game early (which in my mind is circa 2003 or before) and gets it has already signed on to all the new(ish) expressions of social media you mention (facebook and twitter being the more critical in my opinion).
early adopters understand the terms are changing and are acting accordingly; this doesn’t mean that blogging is dead. it just means that all the perks of being at the party are now being distributed to a jillion people instead of a hundred.
even so, the perks aren’t too shabby. blogging has the power to transform you from a consumer into a producer; that shift in mindset gives some serious lift to all kinds of other creative endeavors–provided you understand that blogging is the tool and not a winning ticket to the lottery.
i agree that carving out a narrow niche may be one way to make it in this now saturated world–but being a fully formed, multi-dimensional human being is another. people want more than information, they want a portal to the soul, and nothing makes that more of a possibility than when you tell–or hear–a story.
as hugh mcleod says, “the market for something to believe in is infinite.” i’ll take a few attentive readers and the opportunity to craft something honest and true over partial attention any day of the week.
Of Course blogging is dead, it’s an amateur sport, so is twittering, no one cares.
I blog in bare feet with a glass of wine next to me. I amuse my blog friends. They amuse me. That is what I want from blogging, so for me, it is very much alive and fun.
If I were all about marketing and stats, I might feel differently.
my dear, you read my mind today. between facebook, flickr and the blog, things get busy. and more and more people are hitting me on facebook and flickr instead of the blog. read into that what you will :)
Over two years I had, maybe 3000 hits on my healthy living blog. Recently I started uploading videos to YouTube and in two MONTHS have had over 10,000 views. So yeah, blogging done died.
Real bloggers are becoming an an elite of the “living dead”. Those who actually do some research other than scanning headlines in the rss feeds and write original and unique articles are becoming harder and harder to find.
There is an abundance of so-called bloggers who spend more time and energy chatting on twitter and other similar services as well as posting to forums, rather than blogging.
There are crowds who spend more time and energy selecting which autoplay music to blast us with when we visit or which youtube to embed that we have already seen, rather than blogging.
Aside from those folks the blogosphere is glutted with people trying to sell us their wares via blogs. And there are growing numbers who likwise jot a few lines in a blog as a means of collecting advertising income.
I’m sick to death of hearing the spiels about “the market opportunities” and “early adopters”. The love of money and the obsession with achieving statistical popularity is killing blogging as we knew it.
How dare these upstarts deny us our opportunity to grieve what has been lost? And how dare they bullshit us with their “market speak”.
I’m coming up on my seven year blogiversary, and it’s certainly not dead. Although things shift to be certain…
Niche marketing is the way of the future. I know this. But, as someone who is monumentally torn between all of the interesting things out there, I love the flexibility of a “life blog”. If anything, the unifying theme of my blog is “this made me chuckle.” I’m not sure if that’s niche enough. (perhaps too niche). Any advice for those of us that are split in too many directions?
I think your advice to folks that want to become the next Dooce (or whatever) is solid. If becoming a blog personality is your goal.
I do cringe at the “blogging is dead” - I think all art (and yes writing is art) goes through a mainstream period and then the truly creative break through that and a new dimension of that art is created.
And as for the mommy blogger thing…I don’t think it’s possible to gather a group of women and not have mothers. And as mothers that’s an important aspect of our lives to write about.
That’s it. Agree or disagree, I appreciate the opp. to respond to your thoughts.
A wide spectrum of comments here, which definitely leads me to think that blogging isn’t dead. It’s almost like everyone subconsciously banded together to PROVE to me that blogging isn’t dead!
My follow up post, long live blogging, attempts to answer a lot of these questions, challenges and comments. Thank you for the conversation, which has continued beyond this blog and into several others. And got me thinking…
I love the last paragraph. In fact, that’s the biggest truth I came home from BlogHer with.
Hi there… I also posted a follow up to your post… would love to hear your thoughts on it!
Is Blogging Dead?