Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

Blogs, Books, & Podcasts – 2009: The Year of the Blog

January 5th, 2009 by Leo Wurschmidt

I believe 2009 is going to be the year of the blog. Blogging and social media as a whole are continuing to become more popular and are now becoming essential tools in a businesses’ marketing arsenal. So this week’s recommendations provide some predictions for blogging in 2009 and information on how to become a better blogger.

Social Media Predictions
Mary Fisher is a blogger at Spinfield. According to her bio she used to be a newspaper reporter, and you can tell in her posts. She does an excellent job writing and I find her posts to be both enjoyable and informational. In this post, Mary provides six predictions on the state of social media in 2009. Here are a few of her predictions along with some of my thoughts:

Blogging Goes Mainstream – In 2008, many companies still needed to be convinced that blogging is beneficial. In 2009, blogging will be recognized as an economical tool for sharing information about organizations and products.

I completely agree. I think blogging really is going to take off this year. Dare I say that blogging might even become fashionable in 2009?? I guess we will have to wait and see.

The Rise of Blogging as a Profession? – Gone are the days of having an intern or just anybody regularly post articles about your company. Writing quality and legal concerns demand an increase in writing skill and professionalism.

I am not sure about this one. I agree that professionalism and good writing skills are important for business blogs. My concern, though, is the emphasis placed on hiring an outside professional blogger to write for a business blog. I wonder how much transparency is lost by hiring an outside writer to handle a company’s blog posts.

Budgets will be Saved – Reflecting the economy, lower marketing budgets will require creativity on the part of marketing departments. Limited marketing funds will continue to shift away from traditional media to more economical social media.

I agree that social media marketing is great given our current economic situation because of its low-cost nature. Almost no money is needed to start a web marketing campaign.

The problem a lot of people will encounter when they attempt web marketing is the amount of work it takes to maintain a solid campaign. This factor alone will weed out a lot of businesses who are not truly committed to web marketing and are not willing to put in the effort.

Beginners Welcome
The beauty of blogging is that it really does not take much to start – just a blogging platform and a few thoughts. Therefore, the barrier-to-entry is quite low. All are welcome to the world of blogging. Becoming a better blogger, though, does take some work. There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of posts providing advice to people who are just now entering the blogosphere.

Our blog, for example, provides information on how to write better blogs. Another such blog (ProBlogger) does the same. I recently read one of his articles that provides a summary of posts to help the beginning blogger. I included a few links here. If you are new to blogging I highly suggest reading them to help you improve.

Introductory Posts

Tips for Writing Content for Blogs

(Note: It should be noted that I first found this great blog post at ChurchCrunch before I had checked my Google Reader. Therefore, I am going to give ChurchCrunch a thumbs-up.)

2¢ – Your two cents
Did these links help you? Are you new to blogging? If you are new to blogging, what is the one thing that you feel you need to learn to get better? If you have been blogging for a while, what is one thing you would tell new bloggers to help them improve? Where else would you suggest looking for advice on how to write a blog? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I would love to get your two cents.

Do you like the photo in this post? It is courtesy of Nic’s events on Flickr.

Tags: blogging, Blogs, How To Write A Blog, web marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 20:50 and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.