5 Reasons Blogs Will Never Die
In today's digital world, blogs are as powerful as they are important.
When done well, they inform, entertain and even motivate readers. Long before "content marketing" became the term du jour, businesses recognized blogs' power to engage customers at every stage of their buying cycle - many enterprises have just gotten better at telling their stories through better blog structure or by publishing less overtly promotional material and, more importantly, have improved how they share their blogs, utilizing the many forms of social sharing. Still, it takes a digital second to find tweets or articles proclaiming, "blogging is dead." Here are five reasons blogs will never die.
1. People Love Stories
We as a species love stories - this is the most important reason why blogs will never die. We love hearing them; we love telling them; and we love re-telling them. From ye ole time, people were engaged with stories on a very deep level. The Internet didn't change that one bit: the only difference is that now instead of an actual fire, people gather around a metaphorical one.
From the story of thought leadership gone wrong to a story about a new Google product to deeply personal memoirs, the world will be boring without these stories. And no other medium tells these stories better than blogging.
Imagine how many stories would not exist if blogs have never appeared? Imagine how many stories of success, failure and everything in between would have been left untold?
2. It's an Essential
Blog is such a simple and powerful concept that it is instantly appealing. It's a diary and mass media all in one place and it could be anything that anyone wants it to be. It's not a phenomenon anymore. It's a tool for both personal and business use, and hammers rarely go out of fashion.
3. Engagement
Blogs offer a very different level of reader engagement than social media. In Twitter everybody is equal and in Facebook everybody is equally bad. With blogs, however, it's the classic relationship of audience and the performer that matters. And it works.
People seek characters in their lives - role models, heroes and villains. Blogs offer a perfect platform for this. Each successful blog is a scene where interesting people perform. Audiences love to hate them, hates to love them and experience a different array of emotions. It's why people continue to read blogs - they are interested in things that people who lead them have to say. That's why the comment, subscribe, retweet and share. People want to find somebody they believe in.
4. Blogs Are Different Every Day
The one thing that is often omitted when people are talking about the 'death of blogs' is that blogs are very different. The definition I like when talking about blogs is 'writing on Web'. Saying that you can kill blogs is saying that people will stop writing. It's nonsense. Even more, it's 'everything-was-better-when-i-was-young' type of nonsense.
I'm reading a few hundred blogs in my Feedly. Some of them consist only of pictures. Some of them are publishing 2,500-plus words articles every day. Some of them are about video game news and some are about the poetics of architecture in Montreal. The differences between them are immense and new types of blogs appear every day.
5. It's Not Only Personal
The final reason why blogs will not die is that a blog is a great way to share information about a product or service. Professionals can't do the same in social networks - there's too much noise. They can't do the same in press releases - nobody reads them.
Blog is a place on the Internet that people read and engage with and as such it's one of the best ways imaginable to connect to people. That's the idea behind content marketing, where companies try to create actual value in order to attach their product to it. This article, actually, is an example of that. 'Content marketing' sounds like the most boring cliché in the world, but it's actually a good thing in the right hands. Blogs offer a way to market and do something actually helpful. Isn't that beautiful?
And what do you think? Are blogs over or are they in their prime?
Steve Clark is a person. He once read a book or two. Working for TemplateMonster, he actively runs the world from the shadows, Illuminati-style. Or maybe not. Anyway, be sure to check out his twitter profile and find him on Google+ because every bio section has this stuff and he's lazy to come up with something new. And also because he's a pretty fun guy.
