Dozens of posts are being published recently titled “Blogging is dead”. These posts are instilling fear in the minds of internet marketers and bloggers.

Did they do it for click bait?

Or maybe cause of the fact that tons of people are searching for the keyword “Blogging is dead”?

Some of them even show me the below Google Trends chart and tell me that blogging is dead.

Blogging trends

Let me tell you one thing. Google Trends rely on the search data. If there is less search for the keyword “Blogging”, then Google decides that the interest is low.

It clearly shows that the people who search for the keyword “blogging” is declining.

Blog definition

Back in 2008, few people knew about blogging and blogs.

But later in 2010, as mainstream media and corporates started adopting blogging for their inbound marketing, almost all the people who use the internet know what are blogs.

Hence, there is spike down in the chart and the number of people who search for the meaning of blogging.

The chart doesn’t imply blogging is dead.

But still. Here are my forecast and predictions about the future of blogging.

Authority blogging is on rise

Google Brands

It’s no wonder that we live in the world where capitalism is encouraged.

Google is known to favor big brands and manipulate the results for favoring them. This is made possible with the ever evolving contextual and semantic intelligence by Google. This is making small bloggers and AdSense publishers tough to face the competition.

If this trend continues, the SERPs will be dominated with content by big brands, and corporate owned sites like YouTube videos, LinkedIn, Medium, etc.

Popular social networking sites are also now encouraging the users to create content on their platform so that they can retain visitors longer on their site.

Big brands are hiring content writers at a faster pace to enable them to cover content in every niche possible.

This will continue to happen.

Nevertheless, it will be a slow shift.

You need to focus on building your blog as an authority in your niche. You need to stop putting your effort on building multiple micro-niche sites.

More need of quality content

Quality Content

Blogging is becoming harder day by day. I can feel the heat.

Back in 2010, if you publish an article with a focused keyword, it would easily rank.

But now, due to the ever increasing competition in blogging and maturity in Google’s intelligence, you need to cut through the competition with strong quality content signals to really rank in Google.

Recently Google incorporated A.I and machine learning to its search in the form of Rankbrain algorithm. It has the ability to fully comprehend the content and rank quality content.

In fact, according to a report from SEJ, Google Rankbrain is one of the top 3 ranking factors of Google.

You need to really stress on creating quality content so as to stand out of other content in your niche.

Because Google is on its way to analyze the content more effectively than human beings.

People are becoming more choosy.  Due to information overload, people like to follow only a couple of blogs in their niche. They subscribe to those blogs and follow them regularly.

When it comes to the blogging world, it’s like “The first bad impression is the last impression” – for a reader.

You really need to learn the art of captivating your readers with enchanting content on your blog, or else they will ditch you.

This trend will continue, as people are becoming more choosy about the content they consume online.

The rise of content marketing

Content marketing

More and more people are interested in knowing about content marketing.

Content marketing is like strategic blogging to educate your prospect customers, by providing relevant and consistent content. It helps your potential customers with their decisions, flow through the sales funnel and make them do a profitable action.

In simple words, creating content in order to educate prospect customers and sell a product is booming.

Blogging is turning out to be one of the forms of inbound marketing rather than just sharing content. Nowadays, majority of the content in popular niches you encounter on the web are written by content marketers.

Bloggers need to quickly adapt to the change and master in content marketing, inbound marketing and copywriting. It’s the need of the hour.

Alternative sources of content consumption

Vlogging

Vlogging is buzzing.

Next to Google, YouTube is the next most used search engine. People are now being more accustomed to watching videos mainly due to the cognitive ease that videos provide in content consumption.

If you are in a type of niche like where the audience more likely prefer videos, you could hardly sustain with typical blogging.

Vlogging

For example, people like to watch gym workouts in action than that of textual descriptions. Nobody would like to read about cute kittens. While researching a niche, don’t choose a niche that can be easily made visual.

When it comes to alternative sources of content consumption, you should also not forget to repurpose your content to other mediums like SlideShare, Medium, and LinkedIn.

Podcasting

And also, don’t underestimate the power of podcasts.

Podcast

It is also estimated that the podcast industry will grow further, because the podcast content consumption doesn’t require much of your attention, and you can multitask and still listen to podcasts.

As I said earlier, I highly advise you to repurpose your content to videos and also podcasts to embed on your blog.

Down the lane, Google Podcasts offers Creator and AI features. Who knows? One day it enables you to auto-create podcast episodes by text-to-speech engines that have a perfect human tone.

However, these video and audio mediums of content consumption will not completely replace blogging.

Why?

People who are in need of quick information can’t watch the videos or listen to the podcasts. The blog posts remain the single-best format for quick content consumption.

Rise of content consumption

Content Consumption On Rise

Here’s the good point.

The global consumption of the online content is increasing at a very good rate. There are many niches, and also, new niches are being unveiled every day that has little or no competition at all.

That means the demand for content writers is increasing.

All you need is to find a niche you are passionate about that has relatively low competition and start creating content.

Corporates like Google, are striving hard to make the internet accessible to all, and get the entire world online. The digital consumption is almost going to double in the coming year.

Google Knowledge Graph stealing traffic

Google Knowledge Graph

Google is now instantly answering all your questions on the SERP itself. It’s killing a lot of organic traffic for the sites. The Google Knowledge Graph is still in a nascent state, just imagine how it will be when Rankbrain and A.I fully powers it.

Blogs that are ranking in the top 5 have a higher probability of getting featured in Knowledge Graph. Most of the top ranking sites are like Wikipedia and other big brands.

Nevertheless, the Knowledge Graph can’t kill all the traffic of the blogs. But it would impact small publishers (often ranking low for popular keywords) a lot.

It’s still, unclear how much the Knowledge Graph is going to evolve.

If you outstand in a low competition niche, chances of your content getting on Google Knowledge Graph will be more.

Employment model in content creation will shine

Employment

Blogging will never be dead. Starting a new blog and growing it would take forever, due to the big stress on authority and trust thing. As I’ve said earlier Google is favoring big brands and sites with inherent huge authority.

As you may have already observed, there will be a further growth of big blogs hiring content writers and bloggers for their business. The employment model in the blogging industry will grow further.

Solopreneurship becomes tougher as days roll on.

Creating content on an already established platform than starting on your own blog will seem more viable. Already content publishing platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, even Facebook are encouraging it. They want to be your blogging platform.

Smart ContentBots

Contentbot

Writing is one of the skills that can be easily automated by robots that have A.I and machine learning capabilities. There are already tons of articles that are written by bots. As cited, a bot wrote 10,000 Wikipedia articles on a single day.

This trend will continue.

Automating the writing process will continue in this ever-automating world. By this, it will save a lot of money and time for big news and content publishers.

But some types of content are not effectively handled by robots. Nevertheless, they are good at writing content based on facts and pre-fed statistics.

You need to learn effective content creation and copywriting skills. Contentbots will be lagging behind when it comes to writing persuasive content and writing content that sells.

Have I scared you?

Let’s face it.

It’s the reality!

Being aware of the reality and learning new skills that will be of deemed importance in the near future will be a great deal. Technology is meant to advance, and at the same time, new opportunities will unveil. We should be wise enough to make it for us.

We should be swift in terms of adoption of new challenges in our lives, and should be swift to face new challenges before us.

As I said earlier blogging will never be dead. But the current effectiveness of it lessens. It witnesses many changes and expression of information takes different forms.

Bottomline

What should you do now?

  • Focus your attention on building authority blogs than that of niche blogs that contain only a dozen of pages.
  • Don’t remain just as a mere blogger. Upgrade and learn new skills like content marketing, copywriting and also blogging. Get ready to adapt to the change. Don’t say – “Who moved my cheese.”

I hope you found this post helpful. Thank you.

Let me know your views about the future of blogging in the comments section below!