Despite the huge popularity of blogs around the Internet many people still have a distorted view of the whole phenomenon. Blogs are nothing more than online diaries; blogs are not credible; you can not make money with blogs… or so the argument goes. Below you will find 5 common blogging myths, check it out:
Myth 1: “Blogs are about teenagers sharing their personal experiences”
People couldn’t care less about your cat, your aunt or your school adventures, and serious bloggers do know it. Sure, blogs emerged as online diaries, where people would share their thoughts and day to day activities with friends and family. But that was five years ago!
Over this period blogs evolved into efficient content management platforms. Nowadays you have professional blogs competing head to head with newspapers and magazines. Additionally corporations all over the world are also adopting blogs as a customer relationship and marketing tool.
Myth 2: “Blogs represent a marginal phenomenon, no one reads them”
There are many market studies confirming that blogs can already be considered mainstream. The Pew Internet Project estimates that almost 32 million Americans read blogs regularly.
That is a big number, specially if you consider all the other countries where blogging is just as (if not more) popular as in the United States.
Myth 3: “You can not make real money with blogs”
TechCrunch, Problogger, Boing Boing, Shoemoney, Steve Pavlina, John Chow, and the list goes on. Those guys are making a six figure income from their blogs. What is more important, some of them dedicate no more than a couple of hours every day to blogging.
Those are A-Listers, you might say, what about the average blogger? Daily Blog Tips is 6 months old and it is already generating $1000 monthly (despite being under monetized). It is certainly hard to replicate a TechCrunch’s success, for instance. But you do not need to make $50,000 monthly to consider your blog successful, do you?
Myth 4: “Why should I blog when I can create a normal Website”
Blogs have many advantages over traditional websites, specially if you have constantly-updated content. It is very easy to organize information chronologically on blogs, for example, and search engines love that kind of structure.
If that was not enough blogs also facilitate the user interaction, meaning that they represent a very efficient platform to build communities.
Myth 5: “Blogging is just a fad and it will pass soon”
Many people argue that sooner or later blogs will just die, that most of them are inactive and so on. The latest “State of the Blogosphere” released by Technorati does confirm a slight decrease on the growth rate of the blogosphere. But guess what, the growth is still there.
Every day 120,00 new blogs are created. Further more there are 22 blogs among the Top 100 most popular media websites on the Internet (up from 12 in 2006). Blogs represent a corner-stone of the Internet, and there is no sign that things will change in the near future.
This post is part of Problogger’s group writing project.
Daniel on May 9, 2007 | Filed Under Blogosphere
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About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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