There’s been a constant in the inbound and content marketing worlds for as long as I can remember that “blogging is dead.”
Now, whenever I hear something “is dead” I always first look to see what that person is trying to sell me instead. Interestingly though when I search [blogging is dead] in Google I get a search results page full of people saying things like “Yes but no!” or obvious statements like “No it is not but it’s not easy.”
I’ve been writing on the internet for at least 20 years. Yes that makes me feel, but since I’m only in my late 30s that means I started in my teens. So I’ve been “blogging” for over half my life, though fortunately a lot of my older stuff has been lost to the archives of the internet (purposefully, I might add).
The question of “is blogging dead” is the wrong question to ask. Blogging is just a tool in the toolbelt of content marketing, and there are a lot of other ways to market via content as well:
- Social media
- Whitepapers
- Video
- Podcasts
- etc
What I’m more interested in these days is what the most effective channels are. Is blogging still the most popular of the channels?
I ran a poll to find out from my Twitter audience how they most prefer to learn online, and it seems my marketer and tech heavy audience prefers reading blog posts to learn things online:
To me, this isn’t super surprising. We’re techies. We’re online all the time and reading and doomscrolling our Twitter feeds and seeing new things come along. We’re used to reading things written on blogs, to put it simply.
But let’s also look at the trends according to Google Trends between blogging, podcasting, and video marketing:
My take on this is that blogging has decreased in popularity over the last five years while podcasting has held relatively steady and video marketing dipped then has seen a resurgence in 2021.
So it seems that for now, the most popular way to learn things online is via content written on a blog (for both my audience and the broader trends), but there has been growth in both podcasting and video over the years.
It’s worth keeping an eye on these trends to see how they develop in the future, but no, blogging is not dead. Not by a long shot.