Blogging in 2019 | Is it worth it?
Do you know there are over a billion websites on the internet and every day more than four million blogs are published. There is an enormous amount of people and content available on the internet. There is so much competition for even small search keywords. A recent statistic shows that the amount of people reading blogs is not increasing at the pace which it previously did. There are a lot of reasons for that situation but the study emphasis on growing consumption of different content.
There has been change in type of people consumption.
A decade ago people heavily rely on blog content for their consumption. But now they have diversified their consumption with different platform like podcast, youtube videos, and social media in general. This change in people consumption has increased a lot of opportunity in various different platforms but it has negatively affected the consumption of blog reader. When was the last time you remember subscribing to someone's RSS FEED.
Decrease in social media share.
There has been decrease in social media shares of blogs, earlier the readers find connect with their favourite blog and prefer to share it on their social media handle. But now people don't just read from a single blog but outwardly read multiple blogs. which decrease there chances to make bounding with the blog.
It's Expensive
The one good reason to not start a blog would be that its simply expensive. You are required to pay different expenses like hosting, plugins subscription, SEO tools. A lot of your expenses will be recurring which means you need to spend money every month. Which is awful because when you are just getting started you don't want to spend a lot of money.
Need regularly update
A lot of search engine which include google have their algorithm designed for ranking content which are regularly updated. Which means you need to update your old post regularly or else you'll lose the traffic. If you have a lot of content then even you need to hire someone who would be updating your old pages. This will add up in your monthly expenses.
It take's a lot of time to start making money.
All the above steps are not hard and many people will decide to start their blog anyway. But the real challenge is that you won't going to make any money for few months and need a lot of patients and need to keep posting new content. This is the time when many people give up and quit blogging. Also waiting for months doesn't always guarantee that you are going to make money. As google is making it harder for new website to establish by bringing Constant New SEO updates. It become very demotivating and hard to rank your website.
If you have decided to start a blog here is some few tips
Master SEO
Yes, you need to learn how to master SEO without it you are just going to lost in the internet somewhere. This is the one advantage you have over you competitor by just having 10% better SEO will increase the chance of your website ranking significantly.
Make collecting email subscriber your biggest agenda.
If you want to make money from your blog and continue to do so in future, you should add collecting email subscribers in your biggest agenda. They are you digital assets, It doesn't matter if google changes its policy or your competitor outperform your SEO. You have a guarantee traffic on your blog and a secured income source.
Diversify your content.
In this competitive world, you can't just rely on plain text and believe that your content will explode with millions of readers. Till your content in not written by a Genie it probably won't interest many readers. You need to start adding info-graphics and create quality images which will make your blog look good. Also make videos about the topic and share it on youtube and increase your presence on different platforms. If you want to get results in 2019 you need to revise your strategy for 2019.
Republish it on multiple sites.
A big myth which babble around immature bloggers is that google penalised duplicate content but it's not true at all, The people from google have specified that no such criteria are followed in their algorithm. This is an excellent news as now you can focus on reaching multiple audience on different platform. You can republish your content on sites like medium.com, and Quora.com.
Conclusion
This was my opinion on whether blogging is worth or not in 2019. In a nutshell, my conclusion would be that if you are very serious and want to pursue blogging anyway than spending a good time in reading about blogging and SEO what be a good investment of your time and money. Remember to diversify your content in different formats and platform.