Blogging has greatly evolved, yet in some ways it is more like the first blogs than the direction it is heading.  Analyzing where your niche/career is about to take you is important in staying on top and evolving along with (or beating out) the competition.  

Originally, blogs were designed as somewhat organized locations for placing content - links and text, primarily.  Video and/or audio blogging appears to becoming a more mainstream trend, although there will still be plenty of people who stick solely to text and images.  With more and more people moving to a “mobile” world, they are also expecting your content to be available in accessible form on every type of portable electronic, from cell phones and beyond.

It is these trends that can hurt or lead to the downfall of your blog if you do not correctly analyze what trends are best for you, your blog, and your visitors.  

New products and services that are released, whether free or not, can also inflict problems on your blog if you are late (or early) to adopt.  For example, if you add a widget or plugin that promises lots of traffic and income by running it, and you only generate a hundred new visitors and $0.05 from it, you’re down $19.95 for paying for the tool.

Not only does it involve potential risk due to spending on new products, but your reader begin adopting to the amount of products that you embrace as they are released.  When you become known as “the adopter”, to put it in simple terms, people generally will directly go to you on a daily basis to read your thoughts and reviews of the product, then base their decisions on your viewpoint.  

Several Ways to Stay “On Top” of Trends

1. Become a subscriber of or visit popular “mashup” sites such as Digg, StubleUpon, Google Blog Search, or other more specific sites that feature frequently updated lists of the top posts.  From these, you’ll be able to see any new products or analyze the trends in your own eyes.
2. Directly ask your readers what they want to see more of on your blog.  Are you willing to adopt video blogging or complete mobile blogging, with only a mobile version of your blog if your reader base wants to see that?
3. Be slow to adopt products if you are unsure of the true benefits/disadvantages of them.  See what other bloggers say about them, then perform a testing run-through to see how the program really works.
4. Follow Google Trends to see what services or trends are occurring in the area that you are blogging in or targeting.
5. Don’t let the opinions of others or your conscience prohibit you from jumping on the bandwagon of trying the new products.  Maybe you’ll get more out of it if you review the product for others than simply by going by the word of others.