Blogging has completely stirred up the situation on the internet. It has been something that people were getting used to during the 1990s, but as of 2000s, the online world completely changed due to the influence of blogging.
What once began as a platform for sharing personal thoughts in online form has now grown into one of the essential and most effective tools marketers use for online promotion. The way blogging has evolved over the past decade has blown everyone’s mind.
During the last couple of years, we have been witnessing thousands of blogs around the globe, both business and personal, turning into very profitable activities. It’s safe to say, that blogging has become “big business”.
History of blogging
Today’s blogging started with something called weblog. The term was created by Jorn Barger in 1997, and it was used to describe a personal weblog, an online journal or a diary.
It was primarily used by journalists and writers as a way to express themselves.
To understand this need to share one’s thoughts this way, you have to realize that this was the time without forums and social networks, the time before Twitter and Facebook.
The term was shortened to blog by Peter Merholz in 1999, and this term is now used both as a noun (to describe an online platform that is used for blogging) and as a verb (to write or to have a blog).
Having a blog in that period meant that you had the technical know-how to create and set up that blog.
Optimisation of that blog was not something people gave much thought, because search engine algorithms were just getting started to index the web, and had yet to learn how to interpret online content.
The late 1990s were also the period when blogging started to take off. By 2004, blogging had become completely mainstream. This was largely fueled by the introduction of the well-known content management system called WordPress in 2003.
WordPress is a free platform that makes blogging available to everyone. Even to people who don’t have many technical skills.
More and more people were starting blogs, and increasingly more were reading those blogs. This trend grew so rapidly over the next few years that we now have a new blog coming up every second.
What has affected this rapid expansion is the following:
• Creating a blog is now much simpler and cheaper than it used to be
• The number of people using the internet is continuously rising, so the online audience is increasing
Blogging has been recognised as a desirable profession in the 21st century
• Plenty of opportunities for monetisation of blogging
• A possibility to expand networking opportunities
• Blogging has become a supporting activity for both online and offline businesses
As more and more blogs started to emerge, so did the number of blogging tools. The approaches also began to evolve.
We can trace the origin of blogging back to the online diaries published on the internet during the 1990s via dial-up internet. Over time, the topics of blogs started to expand. Personal blogs as a form of online diaries still exist, but many different types of blogs are now part of the blogosphere.
The number of blogs on the internet has been growing rapidly, as increasingly more people are gaining access to the internet and being able to create and manage their blogs.
Once, creating a blog was an endeavour for which you would need to hire a professional, and you would also need training on how to manage and upload content. Nowadays, you can seamlessly create a blog within a few minutes without any technical skill whatsoever.
From the introduction of the internet and the appearance of blogging to this day, a lot has changed.
Nowadays, blogging has become commonplace. It has become mainstream since the 2000s. Now people read blog posts every day. In fact, a large percentage of people own a blog (even if they do not have a habit of blogging regularly).
On the one side, we have the online community which has been relying so much on blogging as a source of information, entertainment, ideas, etc. People start following blogs they love and use them to keep up with the topic of their interest. They also interact with blog owners through comments.
Then, on the other side, we have companies. Most companies have one goal in common – to reach online users. Due to the massive popularity of blogging and due to one particular search engine update by Google, called Panda (you can read more information on “Panda” later in this book), they have started to realise that blogging has to be taken to an entirely new level.
The benefits of blogging are evident, but the craft (or better yet, art) of blogging is what evolved so much over the past years that companies are focusing a lot of their efforts on creating and managing content marketing strategies through blogging.
Action Point
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