Blogging.

This is a term that actually turned my life upside down.

Ever since I started blogging, I have been so attached to it and every day I have learned so much, improved myself for better, and keep on improving,

Sometimes I question myself whether I made a wrong step, I become quite anxious/nervous thinking about is blogging going to die, the future of blogging.

Is it safe, will I be successful in blogging or not.

This article is equally important to me as to you reading this article.

Hey man, on the other side reading this article, Praneeth here.

In this article, we will learn about the future of blogging in detail, this is an ultimate guide to the future of blogging.

There are many things you will learn throughout the blog including the future scope of blogging, what might the future of blogging hold, what has replaced blogging, trends and predictions on the future of blogging, and 7 common faqs regarding blogging and its scope.

I already said it is an ultimate guide.

Make sure to read the blog till the end and I guarantee you, all your queries will be answered and you will never get any panic attacks or will never get nervous thinking about the future of blogging again in your life.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30,000-foot view of the blog.

Is blogging dead?

Absolutely not.

Blogging is not dead rather it has become a necessity.

Here are 5 facts about blogging which back the point that blogging is not dead.

1. 77% of internet users read a blog.
2. Blogs are 5th most trusted source of information online.
3. 60% of people buy products after reading blogs.
4. Blogs play an important role in advertising, marketing, and content marketing.
5. 57% of online marketers have said that they have gained customers through blogging.

Now, you tell me, is blogging dead or not.

If blogging is dead then why the facts are telling the opposite thing,

Blogging is evolving for the better not completely dead.

Blogging was initially confined to a diary form then it turned to the source of information now it is getting more evolved.

Don’t worry, we will dig deep into learning about how blogging is evolving in this guide.

You will learn of why/how important blogging is at present is to predict what will be the future of blogging, what might be future of blogging hold.

How’s the blogging at present.

In this section you will learn how blogging is doing today, remember this part is very important to understand before predicting the future, i personally believe is you cannot observe how a thing is doing today, why it is important if it is so, then you cannot predict the future accurately.

In this part, you will learn how blogging is today, why it is important and how important it is if so,

Without further ado, lets dive in.

People love reading blogs often:

Let the facts speak here.

• 77% of internet users read blogs often.
• Each and every month, more than 409 million people view more than 20 million pages on the internet.

This fact clearly shows that people despite having a decrease in attention span, love reading blogs is not decreased.

Look, everyone knows the brain is like a muscle and how weight lifting helps grow muscles in arms similarly reading and solving puzzles help increase the strength of the muscles of the brain.

• Reading is one of the best exercises to strengthen brain muscles and make it more active.

Another interesting fact is that,

• Internet users in the united states spend 3 times more time reading blogs than they do on email.
• Blogs have been rated as 5ht most trusted source of online information.

Source: Optimonster.

All these facts suggest that blogs are often read by people.

Having a blog is key for people and businesses.

Yes, you heard it right.

Having an online presence like owning a website is a very important part of success in 2020 and in the upcoming future.

In order to compliment my statement, here are some relevant facts regarding that.

1. Businesses that blog get 2times more email traffic than businesses that don’t.
2. Companies which blog gets 97% of more links and traffic to their website and company.
3. People before buying anything often hangout online looking and learning more about the product.
4. People prefer learning more about companies through blogs than advertisements.
5. 72% of online marketers said that content creation and marketing is their most important SEO tactic.

I believe these facts are actually enough how important it is to have a blog for both business and people.

Fact number 4 is the most critical fact for businesses if the business of any industry be able to attract the audience to their site while a buyer decides to purchase the product, having a blog of the brand can increase the odds of getting a sale for business because for a buyer it increases credibility in view of the buyer towards brand and business which is the most critical aspect in the success of any brand.

Keep all these facts aside and let’s talk some common sense.

Mainly due to COVID 19 pandemic has created a huge impact on our lives, in order to practice and follow social distancing people on large scale have shifted to online platforms.

They buy food online, they talk and network with people online, they shop online, they learn online, they are doing a large amount of their work online.

Tell me something that cant be done online?

In these cases, having a website or a blog increases the confidentiality and credibility of an individual and businesses in their success.

You can call it, having a blog is one of the important necessities in 2020 and the future for businesses and people.

Although social media is huge it is not secure.

Social media is huge.

There is no doubt about it.

Almost everybody is on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

The facts are,

• The total population of the world is 7.8 billion people, internet users are 4.54 billion users, 3.7 billion people are active on social media platforms.
• Facebook alone has 2.5 billion people actively using it.
• Instagram accounts for 1 billion users.
• Tiktok holds more than 500 million people using it.
• There are 1.9 billion people using youtube, 1.6 billion using Whatsapp, 330 million users using twitter.

The facts are humongous.

There is no doubt about it.

Interestingly, Tiktok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in recent times.

The facts are,

• Tiktok has been downloaded over 2 billion users on google play and AppStore.
• Tiktok is the most downloaded app on AppStore.
• Average users on TikTok spend over 52 minutes a day.

There are many interesting things about TikTok.

• For more interesting things about TikTok, read oberla, 

But what’s the current status of TikTok, 

It is banned in some of the most important countries like INDIA.

• There are around 600 million users using TikTok in India alone.

Though these social media apps and platforms are really huge, they are privately controlled.

Talking about Facebook and Instagram, there is Mark Zuckerberg who owns the apps and companies.

He can do whatever he wants with the data he has of the billions of people in the world.

Data is very important here.

Tiktok was found to be leaking data to the Chinese government about its users and many countries other than India are looking to ban it.

Read for the entire article, here.

Ultimately, now people are knowing that though there is a large scope in social media it is not secure in the longterm in terms of personal data is concerned.

In blogging, you get the hosting and WordPress and you are the master of your blog, no one is above you or no one controls you and your data.

The lack of safety of data and security in social media platforms is one of the reasons blogs are still very important today and in the future as well.

More people are blogging than ever before.

The immense growth and opportunities in blogging are one of the main reasons, people are blogging like crazy.

• Read, 13 reasons you should start blogging today.

Look,

In countries like the United States alone the number of bloggers mark is to be reached to 31 million which is around 10% of the whole population of the country.

WordPress which is the best and popular content managing system that powers 30% of total websites and blogs on the internet has every month 70 million blog posts being published every month.

By March 2019, it was that around 4.4 million blog posts were published every day

All these things suggest that more people are starting blogging than ever before.

What’s the future of blogging/ trends and predictions of future of blogging.

In this part, we will discuss how blogging is going to be in future.

What are the trends and important things which play crucial role in shapening the future of blogging.

Here is a quick overview of what you will learn in this part.

1. Increase in consumption of content in other formats.
2. Only publish epic content.
3. Mobile-friendliness is key.
4. Email list building is very critical in blogging.
5. Focus on building a brand not a blog.
6. Google is stealing traffic from other blogs in SERP’s.
7. Search intent is very important in keyword research now.
8. Blog on a single niche and relevancy is crucial.
9. Blogging is purely a business.

Lets dive in,

Different formats of content consumption.

Video content.

Before moving around I want to ask you one simple thing.

For example, you have to prepare nonveg Indian curry lets to say chicken in that sense.

You are not familiar with the procedure of making the curry, hence I give you a blog and a video as a means of learning how to prepare a tasty curry.

Please be honest here, and let me know in the comments which one either blog or a video you choose to learn the process of making the curry.

In my case, video is what I am going to opt for.

Look,

Here are some interesting facts from Biteable.

1. 81% of the businesses are using video as their top marketing tool.
2. By 2022, more than 82% of consumers traffic on the internet is driven through online videos, that’s both crazy and terrific.
3. As I asked you earlier, around 65% of people preferring youtube to get their problem solved.
4. Having a video embedded in your landing page will increase the conversions rate by 80%
5. Approximately 50% of users prefer watching product videos before buying.
6. 85% of consumers want to see more of quality video content from their brands.
7. More than 52% of marketers are saying that video content is the best type of content in terms of return of investment is concerned.

As far as my opinion is concerned, I think fact 2 probably the most interesting fact among all.

Let me know your views on these facts on video content.

Now comes the question, But why.

Why only videos? What’s the problem with blogs?

You will have to agree with me when I say, the attention span of the human today is very less.

No doubts and arguments about that.

You might ask, but how is that related to the increase in the consumption of video content.

Let me explain.

The human attention span has reduced to 8 seconds that is less than that of goldfish which is 9 seconds.

Due to the increase in social media and these instant gratification things and all these notifications things, due to highly advanced technology, our attention span is so less.

Because of this, an average human cannot focus on reading a blog of some hundreds of words to learn about something where if his attention span is such.

Interestingly, the same message or learning in the blog, if explained in a video format, is far more likely to be understood than that of text.

In videos, you can add images, animations, visuals, sound effects, and graphics which all are easy to digest, attractive, and captivating which makes the learning easy and quick to understand.

Because of this, there is an increase in the consumption of video content in the future.

If you do not believe me, look at the facts then.

1. Around 19% of bloggers are including videos in their typical blog posts.
2. Articles and blogs which contain at least one image or visual element like video, graphics anything gets 94% of more views and traffic than having just plain text.
3. Compared to plain text in blogs, video content brings 50 times more organic traffic.

Source: Optimonster.

Podcasts.

What the heck is this?

Well, podcasts are a recorded audio file.

Before going in-detail about this thing, let the facts speak.

1. 32% of Americans listen to podcasts every month.
2. Look, around 67 million people listen to podcasts every month.
3. 1 out of 5 Americans listens to podcasts even in a tight schedule.
4. More than 51% of the American population has listened to a podcast.
5. There are currently 29 million episodes are published in apple podcasts.
6. Just by 2018, businesses have spent more than 500 million dollars on the podcasts industry for advertising.
7. 45% of bloggers who add podcasts to their blogs see much better results in terms of ranking, traffic, and user engagement.

Enough of facts.

Yes.

By the way, source: Podcasts insights,  smallbizgenius, Podcast host.

Now let’s talk about it in detail.

As I mentioned earlier podcasts are one of the different forms of content.

It was started way back in 2004, but compared to it with now, it is one of the faster-growing content formats.

Why? What’s so special about podcasts?

The best benefit of listening to podcasts for users is.

You can listen to it anywhere, it is like listening to a song, unlike videos and blogs where you need to sit at a place in order to consume the content, in podcasts it is totally different.

As a matter of fact,

• 22% of people who listen to podcasts, do it in the car.

The industry is growing quite rapidly.

As a matter of fact, Spotify looking at its growth and increase in demand for content consumption has invested more than 500 million dollars in startups related to podcasts and launched their own voice assistants in their application to improve user interactiveness.

Apple has introduced a podcast app.

As a matter of fact.

• In India, there are 500 million internet users, in that 40 million users listen to podcasts.

These all facts are suggesting that along with the video consumption, there is an increase in audio consumption which is podcasts.

Don’t worry, though the facts are hard to digest they are not going to swallow blogging.

action step:

The lesson is simple, the times have changed and user preferences are also changing accordingly you should also act in order to stay relevant and start publishing content in other formats like creating videos and podcasting which is not rocket science.

Only publish long content.

The days are gone where if you write just 500 words of content and you will rank on google fast.

Times have changed so rapidly and competition is increased drastically.

There are many new updates in google’s algorithm like the Rank brain.

This new algorithm in google helps to rank the quality content as the algorithm has the potential to comprehend the content completely.

As a matter of fact.

• 4 million blog posts are published every single day in which 2 million are published on WordPress.
• Blogs which are more than 2000 words tend to get better results than that of less than 2000 words.
• Finally, out of 1.7 billion websites, there are over 600 million blogs present on the internet.

The last part is pretty big.

You know, we are living in an informational era, where there is abundant information on almost all the topics, in that case, if you want your blog post or blog to stand out, get more links, traffic, and social shares it must be of good quality.

How you can create blogs of good quality? then.

Action step:

Well, You have only 2 choices with you, either to create something better content than what is already existing or create something different in terms of different approaches in content marketing.

• Read, skyscraper technique.

You can move another way around, by creating infographics or a video on that topic and embed in your posts and add more visual elements in your post, make it more reader-friendly & engaging.

• Remember, 19% of bloggers are actually including videos embedded in their posts.
• Read, benefits of using graphic design in your blogs to stand out.

Always remember, the only way you can beat the competition is through being creative in your approach.

The last thing I want to say is, Don’t publish the blog just for the sake of publishing, publish if you think it has the potential to outrank its competitors.

Publishing blogs once a week which actually provides great value to your users is well and good than publishing blogs every now and then which provides no value to your users and sink down in the millions of blogs published every day.

Mobile-friendliness is key.

Look, the number of people searching for things on mobile is vast.

Let the facts speak clearly what I mean.

• According to searchengineland, around 57% of all web traffic is done on mobile devices.
• Even Google says that more than half of their total queries are searched on mobile devices, the percentage varies country by country but it is more than half the percentage.

Hence, you see, Google is emphasizing more on mobile-first indexing.

The number of mobile users is increasing day by day, so it is of no wonder that mobile-friendliness is crucial things in blogging 10 years ahead from now.

• Read more about mobile-first indexing.

Action step:

If your site is not mobile-friendly, you will undoubtedly fail in blogging and digital marketing.

You can use google’s own service to check if your site is mobile-friendly or not.

Check your site for mobile-friendliness.

Focus on building an email list.

You are probably wondering, 

What the heck am I talking?

Let me explain.

You/me all those who are blogging are doing so in order to get traffic, isn’t it?

Yes.

Unfortunately, the organic traffic we get from google is decreasing drastically due to an increase in SERP features like feature snippets and other sections in SERP’s.

In that case, if you just think blogging only to be confined as a blog, you should probably change your mindset.

Let’s talk about emails and email list building.

I hope everyone knows what an email is bytheway.

When your ultimate motive of blogging is to get more traffic to your site, you should turn your visitors to leads why not go another way around and convert the ice-cold traffic to your regular visitors.

Here comes the email list building.

Why email list building is important.

Well, here are some reasons and facts regarding that.

1. First and foremost is email is more personal.
2. Emails are more effective as you get emails are from that audience who are actually interested in your work and want to learn more from you so they completed the process of subscription to your site in the past.
3. Unlike social media marketing, email marketing is more targeted as you are targeting the people who are highly interested in that topic not to random people on the internet.
4. As a matter of fact, the return of investment in emails is incredible, the fact is that for every 1 dollar that you would spend of email marketing, you can expect a return of 42 dollars.
5. From some research, it is expected that around 91% of the consumers check their email on a daily basis.
6. It is no surprise to know that 9 out of 10 marketers prefer emailing to their audience for content distribution which brings quality traffic on your site which then can lead to any sale, lead, etc.

To me, 4th fact is my personal favorite, let me know which fact is you are intrigued.

It does not matter whether you are getting organic traffic or no social shares or anything unless you have a list of email subscribers of your blog.

You will definitely exceed in your business, email list building helps you achieve some of the most important things such as,

• Targetted traffic.
• Leads and sales.
• Better user engagement with your site.
• A deeper and more personal connection with your audience.
• Authority in your niche.

Now the question arises but how.

Action step:

Don’t worry,  A study was conducted by Radicati found that there are approximately 3.8 billion active email accounts in the world which is clearly half the total population of the world, that’s insane right.

You do not need to collect even 1% of them.

You just need to find a way to collect those emails of the audience who are really interested in your topic, your niche, and love your content.

You might be wondering but how?

Remember, jab, jab, jab, and hook which means give, give before ask.

You can create some free ebook, a course, any free tool, anything that’s going to add additional value to your audience related to that topic, and ask them if they want to access the content they must give their emails and get it.

Boom.

You got an email address of one of your audience who is really interested in you, your niche, your content, and want to hear from you.

They got what they wanted to get access to.

Now as you got the emails, you can email them about the notifications of the blog so that they can visit it that brings traffic on your blog, you can mail them about some offers, you can send personalized emails to build better and deeper connections with your audience to stay connected on a personal level.

In order to get all these things done, you basically need 2 things.

1. A hook is your valuable asset which your audience wants to get access to like free ebook and course etc.
2. Email marketing service like optimonster.

You might be thinking.

Why do we need to buy for email marketing service, can’t we do it on our own.

The answer is, you can but it is not going to be worthy and effective.

You see, there are some serious benefits of having an email marketing service, like.

• You can look at your subscriber activity and act accordingly to get more close to your subscriber.
• You can see the email address of your subscribers.
• You can adjust the time and observe the location of your email subscribers and act according to their preferences.

We will not get more into detail of it, it is quite vast.

• Read how to start an email list building.

Blogs vs Brands.

If you are thinking to confine your blogs just to blogs then you should probably think around.

You should focus on blogging as a business and your goal must be making a brand not a blog.

The question comes here, why and how.

Let’s talk about why you need to focus on creating a brand than just a blog?

Why build a brand?

Look.

Google promotes and ranks brands and branded sites more and higher than blogs and ordinary sites.

Ever wondered why brands like Forbes, entrepreneurs rank so fast and well on competitive phrases on google so quickly even though if they acquire the least amount of backlinks, it is because of the brand they built and the authority they have.

If you get successful in creating a brand, you would need the least amount of backlinks and less time in order to rank high on google, it is simple.

Now the question comes how.

How to build a brand?

Traffic and engagement on your site.

I am not talking about the traffic of vehicles and cars.

How many people visiting your blog, reading blogs, and being engaged in your blog.

Action step:

Let’s look at some factors which help you build better engagement of your blog.

• Write blogs for people not for search engines, make it more user friendly and engaging.
• Improve site loading speed.
• Improve site structure.
• Improve site design and user experience.
• Add immense value in every article and post you publish.
• Every article must be insanely actionable not just boring and no valuable content.
• Publish content in other formats like videos, podcasts, and infographics.
• Capture the attention of visitors using every technique you can think of.
• Select only a single niche.
• Improve your connections and relations with other bloggers of your industry.

Among the 10 factors I mentioned, some are the most important and critical such as.

• Site loading speed.
• Site structure.
• User experience.
• Better networking with other bloggers in your industry.
• Capturing the attention of your visitors and building a great first impression on them.

According to a study by Neil Patel, site speed is one of the most important ranking factors along with other ranking factors like backlinks and user experience.

Image of google page speed insights.

• The fact is that a delay in 100 milliseconds can hurt conversion rates by 7%.

Look, there are 2 websites, one with a super high-quality content A, another one with similar content B.

If site A is taking more time than B, which one would you prefer going after.

Obviously, B, because we do not want to wait, people have the least patience, everyone is busy, we are addicted to instant gratification due to social media, and technology.

If more people are bouncing back from your site due to loading speed, it could result in a drop in rankings as google things that the result for that query is not satisfactory to users.

Ultimately, google’s algorithm works to serve the best quality content to their customers and if users are not interested to stay on your site, you just forget about building the brand.

• You can check your site speed on sites like gtmetrix and page speed insights.

Another important thing is that you need to manage and structure your site so well that if you cannot make the most important pages of your site visible within 2 clicks of users, you are probably not going to get them back.

• Remember attention span is decreased to 8 seconds.

Let’s move forward now.

Google is stealing organic traffic by adding more features to SERP itself.

It sounds crazy but it is true.

Recent updates in google are humongous.

Google introduced new features on its search results page which are featured snippets, people also ask, question and answer section, etc.

You might wonder,

But what’s wrong with them?

Well, Google wants to give the results and answers to the queries to its users in the first place and in the least amount of effort the users put.

But 

The problem is that it decreases the Click-through rate to other blogs ranking in the top 10.

Source: Ahref.

What the heck is click-through rate, by the way?

Well, it is a ratio of how many people view your site on the top 10 results page / to how many people actually click the site to learn about it.

According to a case study done by ahrefs, they found these following facts.

• Pages ranking in 1st position of google which does not contain a featured snippet gets around 26% of clicks in the total volume of the keyword.
• If there is a featured snippet in the results page, the clicks drop to 19.6% for the top-ranking page and featured snippet gets 8.6% of clicks.
• According to the study conducted by ahrefs, there were 112 million keywords in the US database, among which 14 million of the keywords had featured snippets in the results page, which is around 12.29% of the keywords have featured snippet.

This study finally concludes that featured snippets are actually decreasing clicks to already ranking pages on google.

Reduce in clicks, basically means less traffic and less traffic means low chances of success in blogging as a whole.

• Read, the complete case study over featured snippets by ahrefs.

Here is a video on how to get your blog featured on snippets by backlinko, my favorite seo expert

Other than featured snippets, you have sections like, 

• People also ask.
• Youtube videos.
• QnA section.
• Google paid ads pages ranking above.

All these features are actually letting the top pages ranking in google down and down.

The lower your site ranks, the less visibility it gets, the less visibility and impressions it gets, obviously less clicks and traffic.

Action step:

Be very wise in your keyword research process, select keywords you want to rank by the filter in many ways.

We will learn more about this part of keyword research in the next factor in detail but before starting to write a blog, you must consider some important things.

• Analyze the top 10 results pages ranking for your target keyword.
• Look for the authority of websites, the more the authority is the longer it takes for you to outrank them and vice-versa,
• Look for Content in the top 10 pages, how they have written, what can you do better to add more value to your users than what’s already existing.
• Fewer SERP features like featured snippets etc, the fewer features are more chances of getting more clicks to ranking sites.

Your target must be to rank in the top 10 pages in the least amount of time possible.

You cannot do clickbait here anymore, the time has gone, the only way you can succeed in blogging is by adding 10 times more value than your competitors are doing to your audience so that every article you publish must be the best quality of the page that exists for that keyword.

If you are not ranking in the top 10, there are 0 percentage chances of you occupying in featured snippets.

You can use, keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Moz which lets you know what is the ctr for that keyword in the SERPs.

Moz screenshot of the ctr.

Now, let’s move ahead to the next factor.

Search intent is the most important part of keyword research now.

If you have no idea what search intent means and you are writing blogs on almost every keyword which contains less competition blindly, then you should stop doing that, it is a warning sign that you will fail in blogging.

Search intent is the most important thing in blogging overall.

What is search intent, it is what is the intention of the uses for searching the term or keyword in google.

Ask yourself these important questions,

1. What is the person or the user actually looking for when they are searching for the keyword in google.
2. What is the problem they are facing?
3. What is the solution they want?

You can write a blog of like 10000 words but if the keyword and your article do not match with the search intent it is guaranteed failure.

Let’s understand this way with an example,

There is a keyword called Ahrefs content explorer or gotch SEO.

When a user is typing the keyword or phrase in google, what is it that they are looking for?

In this case, if you write a 2500 words blog on keyword ahrefs content explorer-like what is a content explorer and what is ahrefs stuff related to that.

It is a waste.

No one really needs that.

Users’ intention is to go to ahrefs content explorer to do some research on content marketing.

I hope you got my point.

The keyword I mentioned called ahrefs content explorer is a navigational keyword which means that the user wants to go to a specific page from that keyword.

Similar keywords that belong to the navigational keywords are.

• Facebook login.
• Gotch SEO
• Backlinko linkbuilding strategy.
• Imagedragons believer.
• Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

Types of search intents.

There are 4 main types of search intents you need to look after.

1. Informational search intent:

The user wants to get some information related to that keyword.

Ex: Donald trump, why digital marketing is important, etc.

2. Navigational.

The user wants to go to a specific page.

Ex. Facebook login, WhatsApp login,  amazon site, imagine dragons believer.

3. Transactional.

The user is looking to purchase something.

Ex: Buy iPhone, buy clothes, buy books.

4.  Commercial.

The searcher is looking for a product like reviews and comparisons before buying it.

Ex: Ahrefs review, redmi vs apple.

Here is an image of how to differentiate keywords based on 4 categories.

Image of ahrefs.

Source: Ahref.

Action step:

The best way to find the search intent for any keyword is to search in google for the keyword and look at its results in google,

Are the top-ranking pages are informational based or review based or any eccomerce sites leading to make a purchase for a user.

Let’s take an example, the keyword is the future of digital marketing.

The top 10 ranking pages are all informational articles hence you should create an informational article.

Some other things you need to keep in mind in the keyword research process are to analyze the top 10 ranking pages, you should look at 10 pages with these factors.

• Look at each page ranking in the top 10 for that keyword and analyze its content format.
• Are they using any media or not like photos, infographics, videos, gifs, etc.
• Is their content matching with the search intent?
• What is the depth of the content present?
• Is the content readable and easy to understand, like can an 8th-grade student can understand what’s written?
• What is the word count of the content in the blog?
• What is the content design and structure, like people first look at structure before reading the blog?
• Are they using any facts or just talking on a superficial level.

After finding the strengthens and weakness of your competition, you need to create a blog which adds 10x more value than your competitor do.

• Look at their backlink profile of the sites and authority of sites.
• If the authority of the site’s ranking is less than 50, it is quite easy to beat them in a short span of time, vice versa.
• Look at any forums like Quora and Pinterest is ranking.
• Look at any videos that are ranking.
• Make sure there are fewer SERP features like no featured snippet and other sections on SERP to increase the ctr.

This is how you need to do the research for your blogs.

Blog on only 1 niche and backlinks must be relevant.

Be in only one niche, take your time in deciding your niche.

• Read, how to select the best niche for YOU in 2020 with an infographic?

Google’s algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day, it tends to rank the sites which blogs on a single niche higher as compared to other blogs which blog on many topics altogether.

Here are some advantages of blogging on a single niche.

• It builds trust and authority in the eyes of google.
• Google thinks you have more expertise in that topic.
• It is the best way to build a brand and engagement on your site.
• It helps you get higher rankings faster than a multiniche blog.
• You can capture the more targetted audience through which you can get benefit from.

Talking about backlinks, today, there is no doubt that backlinks are superimportant 

factors in order to rank higher in google but most importantly relevancy of backlinks is very important.

If you create backlinks from 100 different sites which are totally irrelevant to your niche and industry is complete wastage of effort and time than having a 1 backlink relevant to your niche.

Backlinks are only 1 among 200 factors that Google considers while ranking pages, i have seen sites ranking with less backlinks higher than other sites with most backlinks.

If you are blogging in a single niche, there are more chances of you acquiring more links to your site.

• Read, 200 factors google consider while ranking a site.
• Read, How to create a quality SEO content.

Nonetheless, blogging is a business.

Blogging is more or less the best online business at present you can start from scratch in 2020, and it will continue being the best online business you can start in the upcoming years as well.

There are many growth opportunities in blogging which makes it one of the best businesses you can start on the internet.

Talking about business, every business has many ups and downs, the same in blogging.

You should start looking at blogging as a business and a startup than a hobby.

When you start doing that, many things start changing by themselves.

Every business runs on how well you grab and attract the attention of your audience and customers to get the most out of it.

In business, you have a product that you have to sell to others similarly in blogging you have content as our product.

Your success in business and blogging largely depends on how well you promote and advertise your product and get them in front of the right people.

This is called link building in blogging and marketing in business.

It totally depends on you, how well you grab the attention of your audience where your competitors are also doing the same.

Your strategies, business plan, and techniques will have to guide your business through the journey.

Action step:

You might think it is repetitive but here is the way you can grab the attention of your users more and more and get them hooked with your site, blog, and brand.

• The loading speed of your site, the most important factor in getting your audience hooked on your site in the first place.
• Site structure and better user experience.
• Better headlines to increase the chances of the click-through rate.
• Better usage of graphics in content to make it more appealing, and engaging..
• Add immense value in every post you publish that it has to be the final post for your audience to read regarding that specific query.
• Don’t just focus on blogging just of keyword, go a little broad and write a blog on the overall topic so that you can answer all the queries of your audience regarding that topic in one place.
• Focus on giving, giving, and giving before asking anything.
• Create and embed other formats of content like videos and podcasts in your post which basically increases engagement on your site,
• Make sure that first impressions of your site is incredible because the first impression is the best impression, like website design, structure, logos, eye-catchy headlines of blogs and attractive images, etc.

Faqs regarding the future of blogging.

Here are 7 frequently asked questions regarding future of blogging as a whole, lets answer them.

Is blogger going away?

Ans: Though google shutdown the google plus service, it has no intention of shutting down their free blogging platform which is a blogger.

Hence there is no need to be panic for bloggers who are on blogger but one thing is for sure, even though you are a blogger today or will be tomorrow, you have to shift to WordPress, if not you are missing out many things.

• Read, why not to choose blogger in 2020.

Are blogs still relevant in 2020?

Ans: Heck yeah.

Blogs are still relevant or more important today and will stay relevant in the future as well.

I have mentioned in detail how blogging is doing at present and why blogs are important in the present section, make sure to read that.

Here is a quick checklist of how blogs are relevant in 2020 and how they are doing to stay relevant in the future as well.

• People do read blogs.
• Blogs are important in businesses.
• Blogs offer more security and authorship than social media for growth online.
• Large number of people blogging today than ever before.
• Blogging opens you many doors of possibilities of growth.

What has replaced blogging?

Ans: Nothing actually can replace blogging.

Blogging and blogs are the most important part of content marketing.

• 72% of the online marketers said that content creation aka blogging is their most important SEO tactic to gain more traffic.

There are many great facts about blogging which cannot be underestimated.
Of course, the blogs are not that effective now as it was used to be, as an increase in demand for video content and other content types of consumption, but nothing can replace the effectiveness and benefits of blogs.

• Blogs were, are, and will be the best source for the information/research for all.

Why WordPress is the future of blogging?

Ans: WordPress is undoubtedly the future of the blogging platform and in a content managing system.

WordPress is going to be the future for the simple reason which is it is better, user-friendly, flexible, themes, and plugins support which make your SEO much easier, it is SEO friendly with light coding.

These are some of the reasons why WordPress is being used for more than 30% of blogs on the internet today and the number is going to increase in future as well.

Future of blogging in India?

Ans: The future of blogging in countries like India is quite good because the number of bloggers in India is increasing and blogging community is growing at the same time.

Despite all, the factors, prediction, and trend I discussed above regarding what might the future of blogging hold is going to be static, no difference in any country.

Is blogging a good career?

Ans: Without a doubt.

Blogging is a great career, I would say.

You just need to be a passionate writer to get started.

As you enter the blogging landscape, you will learn many skills and many other things through blogging which could not have been possible if you not blog.

• Read, 13 reasons to start a blog in 2020, complete guide.

Why do blogs fail?

Ans: Well, there are many reasons why blogs fail often mostly.

Here are some major reasons why blogs fail often.

1. Not creating engaging and quality content.
2. Not targeting the right keywords.
3. You are not promoting yourself or your blog correctly.
4. No uniqueness, you are being like every other blogger.
5. Not taking blogging seriously, not perceiving blogging as a business.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered all the queries related to the future of blogging as a whole.

Let me know which part you found to be helpful and going to try out in the comments section below.

If you haven’t started blogging in case, you should definitely check out my guide on starting a blog.

• Read, how to start a blog on both blogger and WordPress, ultimate guide.

If you are moody and unable to decide whether you should start a blog or not in 2020.

• Read, 13 reasons YOU should start a blog in 2020.

Please, consider sharing this blog with your fellow bloggers, family members, and friends to let them know about blogging in case if you haven’t.
Sharing is caring, remember.
Thank you for reading the blog until here.

I will catch you in the next blog, until next time, peace out.