Entrepreneurial Blog Marketing in 2021 (vs. 2009)

Once upon a time, a blog was a social media platform

I created a blog in 2009 that grew quickly. The American economy had just crashed. I lost my almost 7-year job in a massive corporate layoff. Most Americans were impacted. And you couldn’t just work harder to succeed.

You had to reinvent yourself (similar to the 2020 unprecedented time in history). So, I started blogging about deals offered from local businesses in a relatively, smaller town that I lived in, where no one there was doing what I was promoting on the internet.

Back then, I had a voice in a small backyard, such as the influence of a bigger fish in a small pond. I don’t know now if I would have had the same success if I wrote reviews in a larger pond backdrop like the Washington DC metro area I grew up in.

Overall, there was a lot less fish in the internet sea. Not everyone knew what a blog was or an RSS feed. Whenever you start blogging there are a unique set of circumstances in the blogosphere.

At any time, starting a blog from scratch and gaining popularity is not always easy. No one knows your blog, so you don’t have momentum on your side right away until you’re found and word gets out.

Then visitors and comments start trickling in if you promote and have interesting and shareable content. The blog I started caught on and snowballed.

From the daily engagement and writing, I learned about blogs and social media platforms from a business user standpoint in the earlier days.

Blog Transformation (From 2009 to 2021)

In 2021, there’s a wide gamut of blogs. There is a sea of semi-inactive blogs sprinkled throughout the internet, while some active blogs have soared into top search rankings. Many top-ranking blogs leverage their earlier momentum sites.

Then there are still traces of blogs that have been dead for a while (and haven’t posted in years) but are still being supported. They may have popular posts or content from the past that remain in top searches (and possibly outdated information).

The blogosphere could use some clean-up.

Many marketers may start with several blogs, testing out which niche will stick for them and their audiences.

As marketers, most of us are guilty of this as part of the process of growing. It’s smart marketing to test the waters. But that could mean visitors have to search through more websites unless and until Google decides to tweak its algorithms.

As a blogger actively coming back to the blogging scene 10 years later, I created a new blog on my passions. These are some key blogosphere landscape changes I noticed that may help newer bloggers gain some insight on the past and new blog landscape:

The long-tail keyword search research concept of essentially niching down on blog subjects and blog titles, which I had learned back in 2009, has become even more important for blog success (and is critical for being found through search engine optimization).

A decade ago, someone could type in two words in the Google search bar and now you’re better off as a newer blogger, with three or more keywords. Otherwise, your blog can be a needle in a haystack.

Podcasts have also come on the scene and grown, dominating some blog pages. Videos have grown and are more dominant on their channel in video giant sites like YouTube and Vimeo. You see fewer embedded videos on blogs.

Blogs are becoming more one-way communication sites. As Seth Godin frequently mentions, he doesn’t allow comments on his blog. Not having engagement allows for content to be pure from authors/contributors.

2009 Blog vs. Social Media

About a decade ago, blogs were still considered social media platforms. Blogs were often separate, standalone websites.

In 2009 and prior, you could build a successful blog based on demographic information, not having to niche down to the psychographic consumer behavior segmentation levels to capture an ideal audience.

Blogs could have regular engagement. You could receive comments, as one of the indicators that your blog was popular. Blogs were considered a social media platform, as were Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube that back then were trying to figure out how to build their platform followings and mainstream adoption.

People and businesses were creating Facebook pages left and right, like the popular Facebook groups today. Businesses especially had to make their own Facebook marketing decisions, such as whether to create a page for each business location or division.

Facebook has since evolved its platform and user experience, with several significantly noticeable algorithm changes that have influencers talking about daily.

A decade ago, most people and business people didn’t know what an algorithm was. As a marketer, you impressed others tossing around the term as you studied and grew up learning Google SEO.

Then on Twitter, besides adding hashtags and changing character numbers per tweet, the user experience has stayed relatively constant, when compared to the ever-changing facelifts and algorithm changes of Facebook.

The YouTube experience has also stayed about the same since its earlier days. In 2021 we see more non-native English presenters on videos and more ads.

2021 Blog vs. Social Media

In 2021, blogs are no longer social media and are considered a content creation medium. If created, they are often added to the main website. Blogs are distinctly different from social media now. Social media is used to describe the Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter giants that dominate.

One similarity from the past on both blog and social media platforms is if visitors find your content interesting, relevant, and shareable, they will refer to your content, that helps you grow your following and gain popularity faster. These are the micro-influencer communities that businesses highly seek.

Blogs always could be their website with a unique domain. Whether standalone or as part of a larger site, most blogs are one-way informational providing websites about a niche or mission.

Over time, the greater defined social media giants have dominated the social media space in networking, direct messaging, and frequent engagement.

With more overall websites on the internet, blogs that could start and grow in months (like mine did back in 2009), could take years to grow today. Without research, strategy, niching down, and a popular topic, a blog can go wildly unseen.

That’s why other relevant mediums can help and if you’re new, not putting all your eggs in one basket.

So, why grow a 2021 blog?

With the additional effort required, then why would anyone want to start a blog that could take years to grow?

Here are 4 reasons:

• For one, as a blog owner, you have control over your interface. You have the freedom and can add plugins, photos, information, add opt-in boxes, and affiliate ads as you choose. It’s up to you!

Social media platforms have proven to change drastically overnight. The changes can be helpful, detrimental, or annoying for users who are forced to adapt to the changes.

• A second compelling reason for creating a blog is you’ll learn in-depth marketing, organically. If you’re looking to grow a business, yours, or someone else’s, you are a marketer even if that’s not your official job title.

When you’re in the marketing trenches exploring, you can discover first-hand marketing ways that work for what you’re promoting.

You learn to research as I did in 2009. Adding to your marketing knowledge is especially helpful if you’re planning to stay working for a business. You stay knowing how consumer behavior has changed and what evolving tools are most effective, and that makes your user application easier.

…And even if your blog never takes off the way you want, your efforts aren’t a waste of time. Sometimes the journey (process) is more important than the destination (results)…

• You could improve your writing, storytelling, and headline creation ability. Good content writing isn’t just helpful for writers and authors, but also teachers, coaches, and presenters.

Blogging could be the disciplinary habit tool you need or the purpose that gets you moving to take action or reveal the next step in your unfolding marketing or personal journey.

You could also discover deeper categories and areas of interest you didn’t initially know you had or were out there in possibilities.

• Blog creators can feel freedom and satisfaction from using their creative juices, building something from the ground up, and making one’s own decisions. Bloggers are business owners (entrepreneurs and freelancers) if they’re making money from their blog.

A social media account owner doesn’t necessarily have this kind of satisfaction if they don’t have a blog. A hybrid may be a social media and blog writing contractor working for a marketing agency or client, but they won’t have the same freedom.

In social media platforms, you may not have to work as hard to grow an audience that’s already showing up. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to capture attention. Social media growth can be an easier climb and the platform giants don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

As with most things in marketing, some concepts never change, while some radical change like the invention and innovation of social media in the past decade. It’s no longer a shiny object to distract you from your work, it’s now part of your work (and has been since the mid-2000s) where your audiences are having their conversations.

If you’re a blogger, stay encouraged and keep growing in your craft, as you can always turn the written word into re-purposed work as a podcast, presentation, or video. Writing is the foundation to sharing content no matter what technological advancements come around in the next decade.