Richard Barrington - Getting Paid to Blog and Vlog

Chapter FIVE

Tomorrows Blog: Challenges and Opportunities

N ewspapers date back to colonial times, and radio broadcasts have been going on for over a hundred years. Even television broadcasting is approaching its one hundredth birthday.

Blogging, on the other hand, is very much a twenty-first-century phenomenon. That is part of what makes it so dynamic and exciting, but also so challenging. Anyone who is serious about blogging needs to be committed to keeping pace with the changes.

THE CHANGING FACE OF BLOGGING

Visually, the earliest blogs had more in common with a piece of typewritten paper than with todays website formats. The face of blogging has become more colorful, more varied, and more engaging.

Actually, blogs have to be prepared to have multiple faces. A web page that is formatted for a laptop will not display well on a tablet, let alone on a smartphone. Having the format fit the device makes blogs more accessible for their users, but it also raises the technical bar for setting up and maintaining a blog site.

Each of the faces a blog takes on for various devices has to be more varied than in the past. While once vlogging was a completely distinct subset of blogging, even blogs that rely primarily on the written word are increasingly incorporating video clips. In all cases, whether in print format or on video, the ability to combine words and pictures to tell a story is also becoming the standard for how blogs are presented. It is how the audience expects to consume its information and entertainment.

A key example of the words-and-picture approach is the infographic. These are especially valuable for telling a story with quantitative data. Put a table full of statistics on a page and peoples eyes tend to glaze over. Lead them through those same statistics with artwork and succinct commentary, and they will have a much better chance of getting the point. Infographics are also very popular with journalists, so they can be a great way for a blogger to get content picked up by other blogs and publications.

VIDEO ELEMENTS

As noted above, video is increasingly being incorporated into written-word blogs, but simply streaming some video content is not enough to make a blog seem thoroughly professional and contemporary. The nature of the video content being posted is also rapidly evolving.

Will Complexity Make Blogging Less Democratic?

Whether it is the visual face of blogs or the business methods behind them, one trend is pervasive the game is getting more complicated.

Blogging once meant nothing more than sitting down at the computer keyboard now and then and writing some interesting thoughts. Todays blogger is expected to put together a compelling mix of videos, graphics, and text presented in formats suitable for multiple devices while checking the latest metrics to see how the sites programmatic advertising campaigns are going and, of course, a blogger must regularly come up with something interesting to say on the blog.

Blogging is still very democratic in the sense that in theory, anyone who is reasonably computer literate can do it. However, meeting the standard currently being set by blogs requires a much broader set of skills and a greater degree of time and effort. Just about anyone can still do it, but not just anyone can be competitive.

To some extent, the increasing complexity of blogging can be seen as finding a happy medium. While it might make it tougher to compete for attention, it also raises content standards. Meanwhile, the numbers make one thing clear: the increased complexity of blogging is not winnowing down the number of blogs. Blogging is still very democratic, but higher standards might just make it a little easier to spot which of the many voices out there should be taken seriously.

Initially, many bloggers idea of incorporating video was simply to sit in front of a web cam talking. Now video production techniques being used have gotten much more sophisticated, but the evolution of video in blogging goes beyond how wellproduced the videos are. An even more significant change is in what role those videos are playing.

After all, a talking head shot really conveys little more information than a written blog would, except letting the viewers know whether or not the blogger has washed his hair that day or what kind of sweaters she likes. The real point of adding video should be to accomplish things that simply printing words cannot, and bloggers are increasingly rising to this challenge.

For example, a clip from broadcast footage of a sporting or news event may be shown to kick off a discussion of what happened. In this way, the blogger is not just using video to help illustrate a point, but is also acting as a curator, finding and directing people toward interesting clips they might otherwise have missed.

Thanks to smartphones, there are now cameras on the scene almost everywhere, and this form of eyewitness reporting has also become a vital part of blogging. In the 1960s, antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted the whole world is watching, but the truth is that the world was watching only as long as the network television cameras were rolling. With the prevalence of smartphones, now the whole world really is watching virtually all the time whether it is antigovernment protesters in Egypt, a traffic stop in the United States, or just something cute your cat did last night.

Smartphone cameras are one element in the importance of eyewitness footage, but without blogs most of that footage would reach a very limited audience. The incorporation of that footage into blogs is what helps it spread around the world.

Another way that the role of video in blogging is rapidly changing is that created content has joined commentary and reportage as material that has an online mass audience. Vloggers now produce skits and other fictional content that have regular audiences on YouTube channels numbering in the millions.

The first generation of bloggers can be thought of as having sidestepped traditional newspaper editors to get their content directly in front of people. Now, created video content is allowing vloggers to sidestep entertainment industry executives and let the audience decide what they want to watch.

A variety of analytics are available to help bloggers improve their search rankings through SEO techniques, determine causes for increased or decreased traffic, and other tasks.

EVOLVING BUSINESS ISSUES

Some of the increased complexity of blogs is visible, but at least as much goes on behind the scenes in terms of the business of blogging.

SEO, for example, has taken on the intensity of a world-class competitive sport. Trying to write copy that will garner a favorable ranking in online searches on related topics may once have merely been about relevance, but once people realized just how valuable those first-page rankings were, it became a twenty-fourhour-a-day global pursuit.

Some of the early techniquessimply stuffing copy full of key search phrases, or repeatedly republishing the same copy to generate volumedid not result in quality content. As a result, search engines like Google are constantly tweaking their algorithms to reward quality over purely fraudulent attempts at exploitation. This means in turn that even bloggers focused on quality must regularly adjust their policies so their efforts are rewarded rather than punished by new search criteria.