Andy Wibbels, product manager for Blogs.com, at Six Apart spoke about the basic fundamentals of new media and blogging.
(Murdok spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to Murdok and Murdok Video for updates.)
He described a blog saying it “Looks like a diary, but it’s not just a diary.” Blogs are managed with a blog platform such as WordPress or TypePad.
A blog can be accessed anywhere and after writing a post you can add images, click publish and its done. It’s an instant global self-expression that is archived forever.
On the growth of blogs Wibbels said there are 184 million bloggers worldwide. China has more bloggers than the U.S. and Western Europe combined. The majority (77%) of Internet users read blogs and 33 percent have a favorite blog they read on a regular basis.
The reasons to blog are to increase visibility, save time and money. Blogs make money via the bloggers expertise, media exposure, and search engine ranking. “A good niche is a group of people that either have a strong passion about something or have a lot of problems,” said Wibbels.
There are multiple streams of blogging income such as contextual ads, impression based ads and outgoing links. There are also regular text ads, traditional affiliate programs, paid reviews and contextual widgets.
With blog titles either be clever or obvious. “Blogging is social media blogs are the media within social media,” said Wibbels.
Murdok Reporter/Anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.
