Where Are You in the Blogosphere?

To  blog or not to blog is no longer the question for entrepreneurs, small businesses and many individuals. It seems as if almost everyone is blogging, so the real questions are how to blog, where to blog, what to blog, and how to use the blog to drive qualified traffic to the website. Well executed and publicized blogs can be the path to entrepreneurship for bloggers who find the right audience.

Who Is Blogging
The blogosphere is exploding with over 181 million personal and business blogs tracked at the end of 2011 by NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers/

Blogs encompassed almost every conceivable topic from AARP articles to zoology.  To find out who is blogging, the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011 survey collected data from 4,114 bloggers worldwide from September 13 to October 4, 2011 http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2011-introduction/

The survey found that 60% of the respondents were hobbyists blogging for fun, 18% blogged full- or part time for income,  8% are corporate bloggers who blog for the companies that they worked for as part of their jobs, and 13% of the respondents are entrepreneurs who blog for the companies that they own.

Blogging has spawned a whole group of entrepreneurs who blog for profit, such as the “Mommy Bloggers” who are paid to review products and affiliate program members who receive commissions for products that their readers buy after clicking on links.

Where They’re Blogging
There are three major free blog hosting services.

Blogger.com, which is now owned by Google, does not release statistics on the number of users. The State of the Blogsphere study 2010 http://technorati.com/social-media/article/how-technology-traffic-and-revenue-day/ found that Blogger and Blogspot were more popular with hobbyist bloggers.
According to the wordpress.com website on March 16, 2012, there were over 72 million Wordpress sites internationally, and Wordpress hosts about half of those blogs. Wordpress.com and wordpress.org are available through free downloads. There is user documentation on their websites and free tutorial videos are available on www.wordpress101.com which also has paid membership material.

Although it is the newest dedicated free webhost, Tumblr – www.tumblr.com -  has shown explosive growth and now hosts nearly 44 million blogs. One interesting feature of Tumblr is that it allows a blogger to call in and create an audio blog entry.

According to NM Incite, during the third quarter of 2011, Blogger got 46.3 million unique visitors, Wordpress blogs had 20.4 million, and tumbler had 13.8 million.

Some businesses integrate blogs into their existing websites as a separate page or tab. Provided that new articles are uploaded on a regular basis, this is a good way of adding fresh content to the website and obtaining better search engine rankings.

Some bloggers use dedicated domains for their blogs with top-level domain names. Many affiliate marketers use this strategy for better search engine rankings for their keywords. Some companies use a separate domain to create backlinks to their main business sites. And some companies have both a page on their main websites and a separate domain for their blogs.

What They’re Blogging About
Some of the most popular blogs are used to disseminate information, express opinions, talk about hobbies and pets, review products, discuss politics, and provide updates on technologty.
Delivering the right material to the right audiences is very important to bloggers, and they closely follow their readership through web analytics. There are many free services that enable bloggers to determine who their visitors are, where they originate, how many are returning visitors and what keywords were used to find the blog. Among the most popular we analytic services are Google Analytics – the most widely used service, Feedburner, Yahoo! web analytics, Histats, and Clicky.