Blog Tipz

Although there are still three months left in the year, it is a good time to look at some of the trends that will be evolving into next year. A lot can change in a year. Twitter and micro-blogging have evolved to become major components of blogging. If you don’t have a personal blog or Twitter account, it can determine your fate. People want to know about updates and your personal thoughts on issues, both small and large, that don’t or can’t appear on your blog. No one thought that blogging would take this course, but in some ways, this process is reverting back to some of the desires of earlier blogging.

Media has also been a large focus of the past year or more, as blogs can’t just have text. Video, audio, and images have become a large part of blogs, more so than ever before. People want content more quickly, and video is the prime way to get this content – “HD” video, faster Internet connections, and the need for this content is powering the growth. Next year, more services and websites will utilize these features, making it easier to create a blog focusing on video.

Your online profile will need to be centralized. There are too many social networks (although we generally only mention the top three) to track properly. If you don’t utilize the power of social networking, it’ll be difficult to make a name for yourself. The number of Internet users isn’t going to slow down – it is only to grow at a much faster, sustained rate.

It’s sometimes difficult to analyze trends, at least if there isn’t a clear direction, but the past year has seen some refinements in how people are blogging.

Your Online Profile

“About” pages no longer cut it. You can’t update this page frequently enough to evolve around what you are doing in your life. Facebook and Twitter replace these pages, anyway. They allow someone to instantly discover what is happening in your life. Status updates and conversations with others make or break whether people will want to continue visiting your sites or following you online.

Twitter will eventually replace the “personal” blog, as it is extremely easy to utilize and interact with others. Tumblr and Posterous perform similar tasks, but haven’t really been given the spotlight, due to surges in the platform surrounding Twitter. While it is possible to post to these other networks from various sites, Twitter has out shined the others due to the flexibility and sheer number of apps available, whether for the desktop, web, or mobile.

Photos, video, and text will all appear within your online profile. The more content within this profile, the more likely it is that people will follow you, and this goes in line with your thoughts – if people agree with or can understand what you feel, they are more likely to subscribe to multiple sites. In the end, these social profiles can help replace the traditional business card, containing everything people need to contact you within the sidebar.

Being “public” isn’t something everyone wants to do, and it has been somewhat slow to catch on. There are still millions of people who want to start a blog, but don’t due to the fact that there are somewhat high risks – losing your main job/income source, getting into arguments with others, as well as the fear of failure. Distracting people from the positives of blogging, these stand in the way of millions.

Different Forms of Content

Although text will still be a popular way for bloggers to get their point across, additional video and image-based content will become prevalent. As already stated, video and images can perform just as well as text, and get the message across to your visitors in new ways, ways that few others will be able to match as long as you ensure you do it in a professional, well-formatted method.

Although the past two years have been big for video, it may even become bigger next year, with more HD-like content, powering the content of the web. As much of it is hosted off your site, there won’t be more demands placed on your server (unless you choose to do so), but it’ll mean more traffic and visitors to YouTube-like video sites.

Sticking with text will result in shorter posts, in the form of micro-blogging, but we won’t see the longer-length posts disappearing, either. Content will be just as valuable as last year or the next year, but more than anything else, it’ll be about how different and unique your content is, compared to the next blog that comes along.

Search Engine Optimization

I won’t be focusing too much on this area, as new evolutions can happen day-to-day. However, I’ll be outlining the general direction to help you prepare for the upcoming year.

Search engines saw some dramatic changes this year, with the Yahoo/Microsoft deal and Google continuing to gain market share. Website owners will need to focus on branding more than ever next year, as search engines become “smarter.” Rather than displaying hundreds of millions of results, they will focus on delivering a set of ten or so results that can answer what you are looking for.

Nearly all the content you need will be found on the first page of results – everything from reviews to purchase links to relevant products. These changes will certainly drive traffic away from sites containing individual reviews, but directly to the main stores – where a majority of people shop. For blogs that may not do as many reviews, but focus more on content, it’ll still be hard to get good rankings unless you have a good Page Rank (or relevancy compared to similar sites).

Blog Design Trends

Coming up to the new year, web design trends may continue evolving, although they are pretty much set already. Rather than the magazine WordPress and blog themes we’ve seen in the past, a return to simplicity may be in store, as some sites have already begun doing.

Even with magazine themes, it becomes difficult to manage content effectively. For the most part, people want to read the most recent content that a site has to offer. Magazine-oriented sites are only good for sites where an entire post can be summed up in a sentence or two. Excerpted posts, in which a good percentage of the post is displayed, are becoming more popular.

Social networking favoring should be made simpler – by the site designers – using links prominently placed within posts. More streamlined themes and website layouts makes this possible. Twitter “re-tweet” buttons and the like take up more space, but it simplifies the networks that you are building a network on. Twitter has alone been able to deliver much more relevant and targeted traffic than any other social network site. Digg and StumbleUpon can’t really compete, as links are fairly general and diversified – there is no way to determine what content you want your readers to discover.

Conclusion

While this may be an early look at what is coming up next year, you might have other ideas about how blogging will evolve. We are, in general, moving away from the personal blogging on main blogs, but focusing more on it through Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Posterous. The way we publish content will transform how successful we are or aren’t online, and the more we utilize the various tools online, the more people will discover our new content (also true in the present).

What are your thoughts on these ideas presented above?