Wondering if it’s worth it to start a blog in 2020? In this post we talk about if blogging is dead and if it is still worth it, and if you blog, how you should go about doing it. Enjoy!
Is Blogging Still Worth it in 2020?
Transcription
Below is a transcription of the podcast. This transcription was taken from Otter.ai so it might not be completely accurate:
0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives.0:15
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and today we’re gonna address the question of is blogging0:19
dead now if you’re new to the channel, welcome, I’m all about teaching you how to build passive income, become financially free and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in any of that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos. So let’s just get right into it. When it comes to blogging. Most of the old practices are dead, but that just means we need to do blogging in a different way in order to succeed now blogging has become very saturated but just know you know people like Ryan Scribner he made his blog about two years ago and it’s cash flowing a few thousand dollars a month me For example, I started a blog maybe two years ago like a niche blog, and that started making a few hundred dollars a month in affiliate mark. Getting income within just a few months, I was able to rank on the first page for many of my articles actually. So as you can see, it’s not dead. It just requires some smart thinking and smart strategizing in order to be able to rank well on Google so that your blog can be discovered and you can start monetizing it. So in this video, let’s talk about some of the ways that blogging practices are dead and some of the new practices you should be implementing in order to succeed. So first, I’m going to say education over entertainment. So basically, Gone are the days of just posting on your blog, just personal articles about how your day went or how you know this happened or This happened because blogging is super saturated. Now, it’s very hard to get noticed without having a specific niche and having valuable content for people to learn from. So you want your blogs to be educational. And when it comes to entertainment content like that can be for your social media and stuff like that. So that has moved more towards social media where people might be growing their Instagram channel. Are Facebook channels where they’re highlighting their lives. So you want to make sure you’re providing value for them at all times. And if you want them to get more of your personal life and stuff like that, you can have some of that on your blog. But mainly, you know, you can do that more on your social media channels, because you want to make sure you’re always providing value for your users. And that’s going to be why they’re going to come to your blog. Next, we’re gonna talk about keyword research. Keyword Research now is very important. When it comes to blogging back in the day, you could possibly get away with not really knowing too much SEO and actually rank well on Google because it was a lot less saturated. Now you kind of have to do some keyword research to understand what is your audience trying to look for? And what kind of content can you create to serve your audience and that’s going to happen a lot through that keyword research and understanding what people are searching for on Google in order to get the content that they need. This will really help you understand people’s struggles, and how you can cater to them and the more specific your keywords are, the better. So don’t just do generic key Words like wedding dresses or something like that it could be a longtail keyword of the most affordable gold wedding dresses or something like that where it’s like way more specific way more niche noun. So you want to do that keyword research and a lot of the keyword research you can do can be done on Keyword Planner, sem, rush href and many more sites, there’s a lot of sites that can help you with your keyword research needs. If you guys are interested in more than that, I’m going to launch a course with Jason from frugal for less where we really dive into SEO and keyword research in our course that’ll be coming out later. But stay tuned. Next, I would say write long form content Gone are the days again of just writing, you know, short under 500 word articles and just putting out a bunch of those and hoping they will rank they’re not going to rank well trust me that’s gonna be really hard to rank for because a lot of there’s so many articles out there that there’s gonna be way higher quality ones that are going in depth in the topic that you are trying to write about. Right. So Usually, you should aim for a few thousand words to be honest for each blog post. So you want to make sure your content is long in depth and where they can learn a huge comprehensive amount of information through your posts. If you think about it, you’re trying to stand out in front of tons of bloggers in the whole world, right? And you want to make sure that your content is the best. So that’s basically the theme of all of this, you want to be the thought leader in your niche. And that means that you want to have content that people actually stay on, they will reshare and then Google will be able to see that, okay, so their algorithm has gotten a lot better, where they want to make sure that people who land on your page are actually trying to consume that information and getting a lot out of it that they want to share it to other people. So you want to make sure your content is the best. Okay, that is the main thing. If you want to succeed in blogging, you’re gonna have to write the best type of content and write the most comprehensive type of content. Next, I’m going to say niche down now in order for you to succeed. You can’t just write like a generic fashion blog or something like that. You want to Specific and who you’re going to cater to. So if you’re going to go into like a fashion blog, you might say fashion blog for high school students between 14 and 18, who are located in this state or this city or whatever. That’s a specific niche, right. This is just one example of how you can niche down. You want to make sure you’re talking about something very specific for them to find you and then find that you are the thought leader in that niche just because it’s become so saturated. It’s just really hard to rank and generic blog nowadays. Lastly, I would say embed multimedia onto your blog posts. So you want to make sure that you are putting in photos you’re putting in videos so that people can digest your content in multiple ways. You can also put in your podcasts, audio and things like that. So Pat Flynn, for example, recommends being everywhere. That’s like this concept. He teaches that you know, you can put everything on your blog and your podcasts and your youtube so that you are everywhere for different people to find you because some people digest their information through reading which is the blog post. Some people like to listen to podcasts while they’re on their commute, so you want to hit them with that podcast. And then YouTube, some people are just obsessed with YouTube and prefer to digest their information that way. So as long as you have all those different means that will help in terms of getting your information across. So if you embed your video and audio and stuff like that onto your blog post, they will probably stay longer to watch your video or listen to your audio which will help with their page time, which will signal to Google that your blog post is informational that they’re staying on to digest that information. So it is good to have you know, infographics, videos, audios and stuff like that to bulk up your blog post so that people stay longer and might share it with other people. One more thing I want to add is social media sharing is a good idea. So social media sharing is very good in the sense of you know, not just sharing over Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that. It could be beneficial to link your posts on LinkedIn and medium so medium has an import tool that allows you to duplicate your content on medium without penalizing your SEO. So they have a whole page about that you shouldn’t copy and paste the text. But you can basically use one of their import tools, which will allow you to hit mediums audience as well with your articles. So that way you can get more views on your page, you won’t even need to worry about that duplicate content, SEO harm. If you use one of those important tools, make sure to look into that make sure you’re sharing on multiple platforms so that people are finding you faster, I definitely recommend mastering Pinterest in order to get your blog found. So it’s one of the key tools actually to do well on blogging. So I’ll talk more about that later in future videos. But yeah, this is a good list of six tips and strategies in order to succeed with blogging. You know, back in the day, people were kind of gaming the system figuring out ways to rank high on Google. So then they started fixing up the algorithm to basically prioritize content that’s really high quality and more niche down which can be very Good for you. Because if you are able to create these amazing posts, and create this amazing blog, you’re gonna be able to do really well on Google despite the fact that you are entering the game later. Yeah, so view this as a good thing. Blogging is not dead, you just need to implement the right practices.8:17
So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives.0:15
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and today we’re gonna address the question of is blogging0:19
dead now if you’re new to the channel, welcome, I’m all about teaching you how to build passive income, become financially free and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in any of that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos. So let’s just get right into it. When it comes to blogging. Most of the old practices are dead, but that just means we need to do blogging in a different way in order to succeed now blogging has become very saturated but just know you know people like Ryan Scribner he made his blog about two years ago and it’s cash flowing a few thousand dollars a month me For example, I started a blog maybe two years ago like a niche blog, and that started making a few hundred dollars a month in affiliate mark. Getting income within just a few months, I was able to rank on the first page for many of my articles actually. So as you can see, it’s not dead. It just requires some smart thinking and smart strategizing in order to be able to rank well on Google so that your blog can be discovered and you can start monetizing it. So in this video, let’s talk about some of the ways that blogging practices are dead and some of the new practices you should be implementing in order to succeed. So first, I’m going to say education over entertainment. So basically, Gone are the days of just posting on your blog, just personal articles about how your day went or how you know this happened or This happened because blogging is super saturated. Now, it’s very hard to get noticed without having a specific niche and having valuable content for people to learn from. So you want your blogs to be educational. And when it comes to entertainment content like that can be for your social media and stuff like that. So that has moved more towards social media where people might be growing their Instagram channel. Are Facebook channels where they’re highlighting their lives. So you want to make sure you’re providing value for them at all times. And if you want them to get more of your personal life and stuff like that, you can have some of that on your blog. But mainly, you know, you can do that more on your social media channels, because you want to make sure you’re always providing value for your users. And that’s going to be why they’re going to come to your blog. Next, we’re gonna talk about keyword research. Keyword Research now is very important. When it comes to blogging back in the day, you could possibly get away with not really knowing too much SEO and actually rank well on Google because it was a lot less saturated. Now you kind of have to do some keyword research to understand what is your audience trying to look for? And what kind of content can you create to serve your audience and that’s going to happen a lot through that keyword research and understanding what people are searching for on Google in order to get the content that they need. This will really help you understand people’s struggles, and how you can cater to them and the more specific your keywords are, the better. So don’t just do generic key Words like wedding dresses or something like that it could be a longtail keyword of the most affordable gold wedding dresses or something like that where it’s like way more specific way more niche noun. So you want to do that keyword research and a lot of the keyword research you can do can be done on Keyword Planner, sem, rush href and many more sites, there’s a lot of sites that can help you with your keyword research needs. If you guys are interested in more than that, I’m going to launch a course with Jason from frugal for less where we really dive into SEO and keyword research in our course that’ll be coming out later. But stay tuned. Next, I would say write long form content Gone are the days again of just writing, you know, short under 500 word articles and just putting out a bunch of those and hoping they will rank they’re not going to rank well trust me that’s gonna be really hard to rank for because a lot of there’s so many articles out there that there’s gonna be way higher quality ones that are going in depth in the topic that you are trying to write about. Right. So Usually, you should aim for a few thousand words to be honest for each blog post. So you want to make sure your content is long in depth and where they can learn a huge comprehensive amount of information through your posts. If you think about it, you’re trying to stand out in front of tons of bloggers in the whole world, right? And you want to make sure that your content is the best. So that’s basically the theme of all of this, you want to be the thought leader in your niche. And that means that you want to have content that people actually stay on, they will reshare and then Google will be able to see that, okay, so their algorithm has gotten a lot better, where they want to make sure that people who land on your page are actually trying to consume that information and getting a lot out of it that they want to share it to other people. So you want to make sure your content is the best. Okay, that is the main thing. If you want to succeed in blogging, you’re gonna have to write the best type of content and write the most comprehensive type of content. Next, I’m going to say niche down now in order for you to succeed. You can’t just write like a generic fashion blog or something like that. You want to Specific and who you’re going to cater to. So if you’re going to go into like a fashion blog, you might say fashion blog for high school students between 14 and 18, who are located in this state or this city or whatever. That’s a specific niche, right. This is just one example of how you can niche down. You want to make sure you’re talking about something very specific for them to find you and then find that you are the thought leader in that niche just because it’s become so saturated. It’s just really hard to rank and generic blog nowadays. Lastly, I would say embed multimedia onto your blog posts. So you want to make sure that you are putting in photos you’re putting in videos so that people can digest your content in multiple ways. You can also put in your podcasts, audio and things like that. So Pat Flynn, for example, recommends being everywhere. That’s like this concept. He teaches that you know, you can put everything on your blog and your podcasts and your youtube so that you are everywhere for different people to find you because some people digest their information through reading which is the blog post. Some people like to listen to podcasts while they’re on their commute, so you want to hit them with that podcast. And then YouTube, some people are just obsessed with YouTube and prefer to digest their information that way. So as long as you have all those different means that will help in terms of getting your information across. So if you embed your video and audio and stuff like that onto your blog post, they will probably stay longer to watch your video or listen to your audio which will help with their page time, which will signal to Google that your blog post is informational that they’re staying on to digest that information. So it is good to have you know, infographics, videos, audios and stuff like that to bulk up your blog post so that people stay longer and might share it with other people. One more thing I want to add is social media sharing is a good idea. So social media sharing is very good in the sense of you know, not just sharing over Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that. It could be beneficial to link your posts on LinkedIn and medium so medium has an import tool that allows you to duplicate your content on medium without penalizing your SEO. So they have a whole page about that you shouldn’t copy and paste the text. But you can basically use one of their import tools, which will allow you to hit mediums audience as well with your articles. So that way you can get more views on your page, you won’t even need to worry about that duplicate content, SEO harm. If you use one of those important tools, make sure to look into that make sure you’re sharing on multiple platforms so that people are finding you faster, I definitely recommend mastering Pinterest in order to get your blog found. So it’s one of the key tools actually to do well on blogging. So I’ll talk more about that later in future videos. But yeah, this is a good list of six tips and strategies in order to succeed with blogging. You know, back in the day, people were kind of gaming the system figuring out ways to rank high on Google. So then they started fixing up the algorithm to basically prioritize content that’s really high quality and more niche down which can be very Good for you. Because if you are able to create these amazing posts, and create this amazing blog, you’re gonna be able to do really well on Google despite the fact that you are entering the game later. Yeah, so view this as a good thing. Blogging is not dead, you just need to implement the right practices.8:17
So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
