Blogs. They grew up so fast.
Blogs began their origins in the 1980s with the dawn of the Internet as we know it, meanwhile the term “blog” was officially coined in the mid-90s. When I think about blogs personally, my mind shifts gears back when I was in middle-school and sites such as Livejournal were gaining steam. Prior to this, it seemed that conversations on the web existed in solely in the realms of chat-rooms, instant messengers and message boards. The fact that platforms such as Livejournal essentially created a website (or rather, a journal) for you provided a sense of ownership that had previously only belonged to the “tech-savvy” that knew their way around HTML and CSS. With blogs, you didn’t need to know how to code; you only needed to know how to write.
And so it began.
Life in the post-messenger/message board world was an intriguing one. As more and more users took control of their web-based soap boxes, their voices were heard en-masse. It was easy to get drowned out in the midst of so many blogs and communities with so much to say. How long would the blogging community last without being touched by the wild world of advertisements and affiliates?
Not very, as platforms such as Google’s Blogger and WordPress (both released in 2003) changed the game completely. It wasn’t just about the soap-box anymore. “There’s gold in them there hills,” as the saying goes. Bloggers and marketers found huge success through affiliate marketing and Google AdSense. They still do. Blogs have become the bread and butter of affiliate marketers, creating search-engine friendly sites that draw huge revenues due to optimized content and targeted traffic.
What’s perhaps most impressive about such sites is that they essentially thrive off of the written word alone. There are no tricks, really (unless you consider Search Engine Optimization to be a form of witchcraft). When we think of making money writing, we often think of freelancing and selling articles. Microblogs and niche blog marketing combine the skills of a writer that knows what Google wants in terms of content with an SEO specialist who knows what Google wants in terms of code and site architecture. It’s a deadly combination, and everyone wants to be “that guy” who’s the hybrid of both.
I have mixed feelings when it comes to these heavily SEO’d blogs which have now become the lifeblood of the modern affiliate marketer. From a user perspective, it’s no fun drudging through pages and pages of trash because you’re searching a keyword that’s been beaten to death by affiliate blogs. Likewise, content writers such as myself could see a potential goldmine in such sites, but at what cost? Google’s emphasis on Social Media links and post-Panda content quality are hitting affiliate marketers hard, meaning these well-optimized outlets of passive income are requiring more and more active upkeep.
As always, it’s a game of keeping up with Google. A game that many affiliate marketers simply don’t want to play.
That said, I always relish in a blog that is truly free of advertisements. It’s all very reminiscent of The Social Network in which Jesse Eisenburg’s Mark Z. is incredibly reluctant to slap ads on his beloved Facebook. While Facebook is of course riddled with ads now, I think that Mr. Zuckerberg had the right idea back then. From both a usability standpoint and a simple “cool” factor harped on in David Fincher’s film, sites with too many ads simply lose appeal in the eyes of the visitor.
This tangent brings us to a phenomenon known as ad-blindness, but I’m afraid that’s another post entirely.
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