Why start a blog? A majority started to blog as a way to express themselves, hence, web log. Today, a lot of bloggers blog for various reasons. According to Technorati 2010 State of the Blogosphere, 65% of bloggers are hobbyists, 13% part-time bloggers, 21% self-employed, and 1% corporate.
1. Blog for personal reasons
Personal blogging have grown by leaps and bounds and their influence could not be over emphasized. A majority of bloggers use free platforms such as Blogger.com, TypePad.com, and WordPress.com. These blogging platforms make it easy to create a blog, solicit readers comments, create incoming and outgoing links and archive content. Through blogging, anybody can have a website.
2. Blog for money
According to the Technorati report, bloggers who get revenue from blogging are generally blogging more this year than they were last year. You can make money from blogging but it still entails hard work. A lot of people who start a blog thinking it’s an easy way to make money could be very disappointed. Blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Although some people claim to make money in a little amount of time, they are the exception rather than the rule.
3. Blog for business
Not only do people now blog for personal reasons, the business community has slowly learned to adopt blogging as a means of communicating with their customers. More and more PR companies are using blogs to create media hype for product launching and promotion. Technorati has noted the influence of women and mom bloggers on the blogosphere, mainstream media, and brands. The report noted that since the women segment tend to blog about brands, they have a significant impact to brands. More and more companies are now promoting their brands through blogging.
With an estimated one blog created every second, the blogosphere is continuing to grow. Below are some interesting data collected by Pingdom.
Websites
- 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
- 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.
Internet users
- 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
- 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
- 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
- 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
- 266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
- 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
- 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
- 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
- 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
As a new blogger, don’t worry that there are already millions of blogs around the world. The blogosphere continue to grow each year and whatever your reasons are for blogging, there’s somebody out there who will be reading it. The most important thing to do is to start a blog.
