Blogging is Evolving

In my humble opinion, blogging is evolving, slowly but effectively. One of the things I see in the best of blogs is more focused content. It used to be, “throw everything in and the kitchen sink.” This could be in the form of a multitude of advertisements, games, forums, video “candy,” picture albums, RSS freeds from other sources, multiple columns (5 columns wide!), and who knows that other “add-ons” the blogger could think up.

It seems that the “amusement park” mentality of putting up so much “stuff” made it impossible to define the true purpose of the blog. Most of the “magazine” format blogs still do this but they have their own reasons. You can recognize a magazine blog by the large number of navigation buttons and tons of sub categories of excerpt articles at mid point and the bottom of the blogs. Their game is to drive as much online traffic to their sites as possible hoping that many of the visitors will click on the advertisements and generate either affiliate cash or “cost per action – (CPA), money from it.

With so much going on with those blogs, it only becomes a “money grab” for the blogging entity.

Now, small companies and also individuals play that game too by filling up their affiliate ad boxes with more than enough links to make their blog look like a shopping cart site. Now I am not condemning this pratice, only saying if you use affliate banners and links sparingly, then you are doing your blogg audience a favor.

The best of the best blogs have evolved to giving meaningful content on a daily basis. Google, the 900 pound gorilla, also wants relevant, high quality content on the blogs they are going to rate high for. There was a flood of blogs that used “article spinners” and other automated methods for generating tons of useless posts in order to “grab” the search engine attention only to be batted down because the quality of the posts were just garbage.

Thank goodness, I can say that I am seeing more meaningful blogs everyday I surf the internet. The quality of the writing just amazed me now. Sure, it takes way more work to produce good content, but in the end, if it stays online “forever” you stand to rank higher with the search engines for years to come and reap the rewards of being “found” more often than not.