What Exactly IS A Blog?
What Do We DO Here?
We are Bloggers. Yes. In case you were wondering exactly what we learn and DO here at Wealthy Affiliate (WA): We are Bloggers. Everything else is secondary to this here fact. Including, (wait for it), earning money online.
Okay, I said it.
Now that I have said it, may I ask you: Do you know what blogging is? I believe that if you understand the purpose and construct of what you are doing, it becomes exponentially easier to connect passionately and succeed at it.
This goes for anything that you are doing. Hence, the saying: If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.
Blogs Are Fairly Recent
I started working in the world of computers in 1983. Back then computers were mainframes and we wrote our own code. Miles and miles of coding to do simple tasks. There was no blogging, only code.
Fast track 10 years and we may have had our first blog. Not that it was called a blog back then. It was simply a diary that a guy had on the internet. A personal page that he used to write and jot about himself, life, activities, interests, etc.
A couple of years later the term 'weblog' was coined to name the activity of logging information from the web while browsing.
'Weblog' was soon shortened to 'blog' by a Programmer in 1999 and 5 years later Merriam-Webster announced it as their word of the year.
As we say now: The word blog "went viral".
In 1999, Evan Williams started the platform 'Blogger" which some of your here may know. Through this platform, Evan is acknowledged as the person who did the most to bring blogging into the mainstream.
A New Century Brings Unprecedented Growth
It was the start of the 21st century that blogging as we know it really took off. According to Cameron Chapman, in 1999 there were just 23 blogs on the internet. By mid-2006 there were over 50 million blogs! I have to repeat that to digest it: 50 MILLION blogs!!
Which brings me to our blogging platform here at WA, WordPress, which was started 17 years ago in 2003.
In that same year, the advertising platform, AdSense was launched. It was the very first ad network on the internet that facilitated the matching of ads to the content in a blog.
This provided an opportunity for Bloggers to start making money from their writing and websites.
I do not have to tell you that with this phenomenal change came super phenomenal growth of blogging and bloggers on the internet.
growthbadger.com says that there are over 600 million blogs in the world today and over 1.7 Billion websites. That is some awesome amount of writing!
With 77.8 million new blog posts being published on WordPress each month, that is 2.6 million each DAY - on WordPress alone.
Competition or Cash?
Well, that depends on if you see the glass half-full or half-empty.
The way I see it, it is also an awesome amount of opportunities for us to earn some serious cash. Do you know what the stats are for people who search "How to start a blog" on Google per month?
121,000 times.
That is over 4,000 EVERY DAY. Those are over 4,000 opportunities for us every day, with that one search on one search engine. As you all know, "How to start a blog" is just one in a zillion keyword searches that we could use.
Let's Go Future Bloggers!
That's us . . . marching confidently and bravely into our future.
For sure, blogging is not going anywhere when I look towards the horizon. However, I would say, there is a lot of room for growth and creative and innovative ways to direct traffic, find content and deliver it to the billions of internet users out there.
We are in the right place at the best time.
Make the most of the opportunity and see you in the future.
Live Well | Travel Light | Change The Scrit | Love What You Do
Cassi
Recent Comments
36
Its such a new term to me and to most of the people I know my age.... its sounds funny. People say, "So you are still playing on the computer." If I say, I am writing about fishing, they say, "That's really interesting."
Good post, Cassi. I've never had a blog done until I joined WA. Being able to blog here makes me feel comfortable with the friendly community at WA. Thanks for sharing. Many wishes to your success.
Thank you, John.
Yes.
Our WA Community is very conducive to that feeling of comfort.
Great for inspiration and writing.
Cassi
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Terrific Post Cassi. I started as a mainframe repairman in the service in 1964. I am still new, but as I see it, a successful blogger is the person who can tell a good story (post) that people (audience) are very interested in reading. If that post leads to an affiliate that sells that product he/she can make money. Help people find things for different reasons; price, quality, hard to fine & many more without going out into traffic and have it delivered to there place. Love your post very professional.
Edward, thank you so very much.
I appreciate your feedback and sharing.
It is good to know that I have a fellow early computer professional in my network.
We speak a different language. 😊
Cassi