SEO 2.0

Website vs Blog: What’s the difference?

What is the single most important difference between “conventional” or “static” websites and blogs? Many people will probably reply

1. Blogs are dynamic, websites are not
2. Blogs encourage conversation, websites do not
3. Blogs offer RSS, websites do not
4. Blogs publish current news, websites do not
5. Blogs create the blogosphere while websites are in a way standalone islands

Now you already might suspect where I’m at: All of the differences, with the exception of #5 maybe are not true (anymore)!

• You have all kinds of websites which are enhanced in a way that they are not static but dynamic in their nature and I do not speak about static HTML vs PHP
• Also you do not need a blog to lead a conversation. Asides from forums, wikis and all kinds of Web 2.0 sites any site can add a comment form or a connection to a forum which will enable users to engage in a conversation and also engage you, the publisher, in one.
• There also plenty of services which will create an RSS feed for any website etc. based sites.
  

News sites like CNN or BBC are of course not blogs but they publish news and naturally the two are not the only ones. Everybody can create a non-blog website that deals with the latest news, buzz or products.

While there is no extra sphere for websites, the so called blogosphere is not as tangible either I would argue. Nonetheless this is indeed a difference somehow. Is this the most important difference? No, it isn’t.

It has been a long time…

What is the most important difference between websites and blogs? It’s about being up to date or timeless. Or it’s about being still valid. The info at a blog is expected to be valid at a certain point in time while the content on a website is expected to be timeless.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this but generally you assume that a website you end up on which is not a blog and which has no date marking when it was published contains still valid information. In contrast you will often not even read a blog entry after noticing that it was published two years or sometimes even 2 months ago.

When I started my SEO 2.0 blog I was surprised that my theme, DM Bloodless, has the date removed from the posts. After realizing it I thought about it and decided to let the date to be hidden.

Why?

I wanted my blog to both a timeless website and an up to date blog.

A few weeks later I published a post called 5 Dirty Blogging Tricks which covered this decision in a short sentence.

.

Blogsites combine the best of two worlds.

After almost 9 months of blogging at SEO 2.0 I am convinced that it was the right decision. Combining the advantages of websites and blogs is not as easy as I imagines though.

What to do?

You have either to refrain from publishing news or you have to find a way to deal with the fact that they are not timeless. You can:

• Add a date in the content of the post: “As October 2007 it has…”
• Add updates to a post “Update 11. December, 2007: The service has been discontinued by now”
• Delete old posts or rewrite them.

Who wants to update old posts which are rarely visited if it all? Well, I don’t in most cases. You can change the date though and republish them on top though. This way you save some time by not posting a completely new posting while also offering new insights, perspective or another update.

Which one of the two do you prefer?

Think about it and please add your opinion:

• What dis/advantages do you think this combination of blogsites does have?
• How else can you combine the advantages of both without doubling the workload?
• Do you update or delete your old postings?
• Am I right at all? What is the most striking difference between blogs and websites in your opinion?
• Who will become the next president of the United States of America?

Thus I won’t tell you that WordPress 2.5 has just been released this weekend!

Need some killer headlines for tremendous online success via social media and beyond? Try some of these formulas that have worked numerous times:

1. Top 10… [something everybody needs or craves] [some superlatives]
2. How to… [something everybody needs or craves]
3. The Ultimate Guide to… [something everybody needs or craves]
4. 100 Ways to… [something everybody needs or craves]
5. 101 Resources… [something everybody needs or craves]
6. 10 Habits of… [some superlatives]
7. How * Made Me… [some superlatives]
8. The Secret of… [something everybody needs or craves]
9. The Zen of… [something everybody needs or craves]
10. Meta-List: Top 10 Lists of… [something everybody needs or craves]

Of course the article must deliver what the headline promises! Use “ultimate guide” if it really is the ultimate guide. Don’t call it a secret if it’s widely known etc.

Some possible examples:

1. Top 10 Killer Headline Formulas for Tremendous Online Success
2. How to Write Headlines that Make Women Fall in Love with You
   
3. The Ultimate Guide to Killer Headlines that Will Flood Your Blog With Traffic
   
4. 100 Ways for Lethal Headlines to Kill
   
5. 101 Resources for Bloggers to Write Killer Headlines
   
6. 10 Habits of Copywriters Who Get Paid Thousands Just for Headlines
   
7. How Using Killer Headlines Made Me a Superstar
   
8. The Secret of Becoming an Internet Celebrity by Killer Headlines
   
9. The Zen of Headline Writing
   
10. Meta-List: Top 10 Lists of Killer Headline Formulas
    

Be cautious. Don’t use killer headlines irresponsibly. They might kill! Especially if you refer to chocolate.

Did somebody say “keyword stuffing“?

While I enjoyed my short vacation on Easter I couldn’t resist to think about SEO 2.0 with all its major parts Web 2.0, social media and blogging. I want to share with you a saying that kept popping up on my mind:

Do not put all your eggs into one basket.

This is an idiom that is used very often on the Net in the realm of SEO or marketing at large. Why? All of them may break at the same time. It can be applied on many different levels:

a) Social media participation
Users who have been banned on Digg for no reason after participating for years can tell you a whole lot about that. Do not contribute solely to one social site because you can lose all your authority any day. A site can even go bankrupt. It can break down, ban you or become otherwise useless. Thus I am actively participating at 3 sites and from time to time at 3 more.

In short it means:

Do not put all your time and effort into just one social medium or UGC site.

Rather use the triangle strategy by combining 3 to 5 social media.


b) Traffic sources
While in Germany most webmasters and worse business owners are often highly dependent on Google traffic in the blogosphere by now lots of people rely on StumbleUpon as the main source of traffic. I quickly found out how this might backfire and from then on concentrated on providing value for regular visitors or those who subscribed to SEO 2.0. If they already know something I won’t write another post about it just to suit the lowest common denominator of StumbleUpon. My posts get nevertheless submitted to SU each and every time but on many days the direct visitors outnumber the casual stumblers. SEO 2.0 has at least 3 to 5 major traffic sources:

1. Core audience coming via type in traffic, Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines and the likes
2. Community and niche sites I contribute to like Sphinn, CSS Globe or Mixx.
3. Also I get more and more traffic via blogs and sites that link to me, where I guest posted or even commented. Thus the success of others is also my success.
4. StumbleUpon, where I get submitted by my readers, I rarely review myself (only if I think I have been misrepresented)
5. Oh, yes, Google long tail search queries but I don’t care for these enough.
   

In short it means:

Do not rely on one major traffic source, be it Google search or StumbleUpon.

Diversify your traffic sources and concentrate on a core audience of fans, subscribers and returning visitors.


c) Revenue or income streams
I already mentioned this very important aspect of freelancing or doing business. You need to have several income sources. If you are just working for one client you can end up broke very quickly. I had to learn this the hard way. Also being dependent on client work itself is a mistake. You need to find ways to earn money while you are asleep via selling products, ads or affiliations. If you get sick and you can’t work for clients… The same applies to small businesses and companies. They don’t get sick but they might lose their clients. If the have no profitable side projects that yieldsubstantial revenue they will fail.

In short it means:

Do not depend on one client or client work at all.

Diversify your income. Try to establish your won scalable projects which will run on autopilot if necessary.


All in all, do not let any medium monopolize you. SEO 2.0 is about using Web 2.0, social media and blogging without being enslaved by them. It’s the declaration of independece online.

Content thieves “make money online” off your content. This car could be yours instead.

Recently two of my blogging friends were struck by bold content thieves. I do not speak of automatic content scrapers who also are a pain in the back of my SEO 2.0 blog but lowly and greedy copy cats who only manage to find out which posts are very popular on social media and to copy and paste them in their entirety to their blogs.

You must fight content thieves at least to prevent Google to drop you assuming that you are the duplicate content.

Maybe some automation is used in these cases too but I’m sure there is some human behind it who will notice if you get angry.

Of course getting angry is not enough, you got to strike back to make them feel the pain they inflicted on you.

Lawyers and police do not help much on the Internet. The web on the other hand, especially of the 2.0 kind has plenty of self-healing aspects which are very supportive in these cases.

So here I present to you 10 ways to fight back content thieves:

1. Comment if possible, make ‘em feel you know about them
2. Tell everybody and expose the content thieves publicly by just writing “The x blog is a content thief”.
3. Contact their blog hosting service: wordpress.com e.g. is very quick and supportive Lid of Blog Well told me.
4. Contact their ISP. Run a who is search and report the content thief to the ISP they use. Unless they have a server in the basement, it breaks the TOS.
5. Contact their advertisers, Content thieves want to “make money online” by cheating so fight them where it hurts most. Again, most advertisers do not allow content theft.
6. Use social media like StumbleUpon to give them a bad review and add the original source where-ever they have been submitted instead of you. Also contact the social site admins to remove the copy and take the original URL of yours.
7. File a Google spam report.
8. Find other bloggers whose content has been stolen and act together.
9. Take some content from the site that took yours. If they think they can steal from others, why not taking theirs too? Guess where I got the pic above
10. Write a post making others aware of the ways to fight back content theft

Do not provide additional publicity for the thieves, as they do not care how they get traffic or links, they only care that they do. Do not link them, not even using nofollow as people will still click the links.

Precaution is the best way to deal with content theft, there are few easy measures that will at least make the content theft a two edged sword:

• Add internal links to older blog posts to your list posts, thieves are lazy and will not in most cases edit #21, #37 and #54 of your list.
• Write from a personal point of view, “my friends a, b, c think” and link your blogging peers. These friends will also notice that they just got befriended by a content thief and at least alert you.
• Mention your name or your blog in the post.

These methods do not make the content thievery go away but you aren’t and you do not feel powerless in such cases.

First off: The introduction of real links in comments via the dofollow plugin has been a huge success, especially as I am ranking high for both “dofollow” and “dofollow plugin” in Google by now because my article about the end of conventional SEO was so popular and has been reprinted or translated numerous times including my “dofollow” link.

Dofollow encouraged participation substantially, moreover what most people do not mention in this context: It made this blog a really friendly place.

Commenters who also want a link rarely will offend you. So by far most coments are friendly, helpful and adding some new perspective, update or information. In short: People commenting on SEO 2.0 are truly contributing. In many cases I even rank for long tail queries that are found only in my comments.

Blogging is like inviting people to your barbecue party: They get invited and receive free food while you enjoy a nice get together.

I use Akismet for spam protection and thus have rarely problems with real spammers who let robots comment automatically on thousands of blogs. There are sometimes problems with false positives in case of people Akismet markes accidentally as spam. Aaron Wall of SEO book was flagged as spam by Akismet and one of my eager contributors david deangelo has been filtered time and again even after I made him a “member” of this blog. This is a bug that sucks but I will de-spam your comments if you contact me by email, my adress is onreact at onreact.com

Many people complain about so called “manual spam” which is an oxymoron in a way. Spam is an unsolicited message and if you allow comments (by people) you can’t call it spam in this case. Thus comments made by humans not robots are not spam in 99% of cases. Nonetheless some things annoy me too:

1. People commenting with a name like “SEO Company” or “Real Estate California” because I want people to comment not companies or services, especially if the keywords have nothing to do with SEO or other topics of this blog.

2. One liners saying something like “thanks, great article” because I don’t know if they are made by robots or not if they do not refer to the post.

3. People who do not read the article but comment based on the title and it’s keywords because it’s just ridiculous to state “I also like three-way links” if I just wrote that I hate them.

4. People using German or other non-English keywords as their “name” because it is impolite to exclude the majority of my readers who do not understand.

5. Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.

6. People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.

7. Commenters who disagree with me, because I never err you damn naysayers!

On good days I will just approve your comments, on normal days I will change your “name” to something which sounds actually like a name or remove your URL but on bad days I will spam your comment or delete it.

Spamming your comment means that you get flagged on other Wordpress blogs too so you probably do not want to risk that.

There are easy solutions or exceptions for most of these cases where both you and I can live with them or they even add some additional value. Tim Nash, a SEO consultant from the UK has a nice technical solution implemented: He added an extra text box for your favorite anchor text. This is really neat but I’m too lazy to hack my WordPress comment form and thus I prefer the easiest solution, introduced in part by my favorite blog consultant, Michael Martine. He just combines two things, his name and his job description.

So check out these simple rules of blog commenting netiquette, they might not apply everywhere but they will help you not be thrown out at SEO 2.0 and in other places probably too.

1. You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
2. I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
3. If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
4. Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
5. Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
6. A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
7. Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.
   

Did I forget something? Probably, feel free to add your take on the subject of blog commenting netiquette an barbecue parties in the comments below Introduce yourself and be nice to the other guest.

WordPress is, you might already suspect it, the most popular blogging platform aka blog CMS out there. Thee are plenty of good reasons to use it although WordPress has some major drawbacks (it’s bloated, can be easily hacked, has a super-ugly admin interface etc). Nonetheless I use WordPress for more than one blog, indeed I use WordPress since 2003 for numerous projects.

WordPress lets you change your URL structure with ease. That’s nice but also there are some pitfalls.

Why should you rewrite your URLs in the first place?

• to make them readable and self explanatory
• to make them Google friendly
• for better archiving

Now said that there is no one way to do that. There is no ideal URL structure for WordPress. It depends on what you need.

Just think about how you use your WordPress installation:

• as a blog (most probably but not necessarily)
• as a website
• as a news source
• a an archive or library for real or metaphorically speaking

Now there are several ways to “design”, as in so called URL design, your WordPress URLs. After years of practice my favorites are…

Stop, first I want to show you what the average WordPress URLs look like:

1. domain.com/?p=123
2. domain.com/category-name/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design/
3. domain.com/2008/03/15/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

None of them are perfect, most of them have significant drawbacks.

#1 is short, no need for “tinyurl” services and it does not use any rewrite rules. I like that in some cases, for instance for blogs that have large numbers of short posts, then you can show off by having a four or five digit post number. It tells you nothing about the content though. Imagine this link in an email. Would you click it or rather a link like that: domain.com/britney-spears-naked

#2 lets you categorize your content but as WordPress categories do not work as desired, you can’t really choose which category is the most important one if you ascribe more than one and WP will almost randomly choose one, it’s worthless. Also, the “/” at the end mimics a directory which a post is not. Do you really want to trick your readers you dirty black hat SEO?

#3 is great for a historical view bu most blog readers expect current posts on a blog. Do you really think someone will click on a link like domain.com/2005/03/15/breaking-news ?

Now lets take a look at my own URL:
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

I love simplicity and I wanted my blog to appear to be a real website with real content not just ephemeral blog postings. It is not ideal for several reasons or rather purposes though.
Let’s say I make a list of 10 items and the add some more. I can’t change the URL though, as it would yield a 404 not found error n the old one.

Consider this URL again: domain.com/?p=123
Now changing the headline does not have any impact on it. Now wouldn’t it be great to combine these two? Yes, as I am a man of “as well” instead of “either or” you can and should.

The solution is fairly simple:
domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

This URL has a major advantage:

Long URLs send via email often get cut at the end or otherwise destroyed in the process of sending.

It does not matter with this one.

• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design
• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-
• domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-%FC%DF%F6%E4
• domain.com/123/
• domain.com/?p=123

will all successfully lead to the same post.

Unfortunately this is not enough in many cases. As Google is quite stupid and does not know you are a blog unless you call yourself a blog you might want to use

domain.com/blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

or better, if you want to rank for the often searched for keyword+blog combination:

domain.com/seo-blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

You can achieve this either by uploading your WordPress installation into the real “blog” or “seo blog” directory on you server via FTP or by rewriting again. WordPress lets you add a so called “category_base”.

Many people still want to use the date in their URLs as they write news blogs and for better archiving. You do not have to fake three directories with slashes (”/”) doing that.
When I want to retain the date I use either one of these two URL structures:

domain.com/20080315
or
domain.com/2008-03-15

Also

domain.com/2008.03.15
is possible.

WordPress will still allow you to access the years as in “domain.com/2008″, months or days.

Now you still have to decide which URL or Permalink design is the best for you.

The implementation of the desired URL structure is shown here at Wordpress.org or here with some screenshots.

There are also some dirty tricks as I like to call them

For instance you can any suffix after the URL. So instead of the good old “.html” or “.php” yo can add anything you want. In my case something like “.seo” would be perfect.
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design.seo

Dear Subscribers and Returning Visitors,

I am again struck by inspiration overflow. This is really a problem combined with very limited time resources.

There are some article ideas in my head or drafts on my PC to choose from. So I need your assistance again. Which one/s do you prefer? Like last time the one with the most votes will be published.

1. Case Study: How to Get a StumbleUpon Submission Reviewed 200 Times in 2 Weeks
2. 7 Must Read New Free Ebooks on SEO, Marketing and Blogging
3. 5 Surefire Ways to End Up on the Sphinn Frontpage
4. Top 10 PayPal Alternatives
5. SEO 2.0, the Redefinition of SEO
6. 12 Social Media Metrics Tools
7. 12 Must Read Self Improvement Blogs
8. How to: StumbleUpon Onpage Optimization
9. List of SEO 2.0 Companies
10. The Secret Digg Frontpage Formula Uncovered

I have some other ones I don’t want to tell you as the ideas are so good you might put them in practice before I manage to, so you have to choose one, two or 3 out of the above.

For years ROI or Return on Investment was a term used by business people in suits and marketers who worked for them. While search marketers often obsessed with rankings, traffic and conversions. Recently ROI is going mainstream as not only SEOs turn to ROI as the most important metric after rankings and traffic have become too unreliable to measure success the web. Most notably the book Web Design for ROI I already mentioned makes a huge leap in reversing the process of designing websites.

While a good looking homepage was key for many execs, now the check out forms or sign up pages are the most important parts of the website.

Now ROI turns into obsession though in the course of overt monetization of everything. Bloggers turn to measuring the ROI of blogs and social media as if ROI was a applicable to these media types.

To get the point across across quickly I ask you three questions:

1. Do you measure the ROI of meeting your friends?
2. Do you measure the ROI of reading books?
3. Do you measure the ROI of giving away presents?

Now you probably understand where I’m at. ROI is a monetary metric. I invest 100$ and get 200$ thus my ROI 200%. The same applies to time spent on work.

How in contrast do you want to measure time spent on things that are part work, part leisure?

In the current society the difference between both vanishes more and more each day. Especially the nature of the Web itself where you give away things for free and get others also for no cost changes our notions of work.

So do I work writing this blog? Well, not really, or partly, I am not earning money directly. Do I earn money because of the blog? I do. How do I know which money or how much of it ensued due to me writing the blog? I can’t. Often it is not measurable. Also you have to ask yourself whether it is desirable to measure it.

You do not want to measure the ROI of your relationships but you will have to admit that having a partner or children has a very positive impact on your life and thus your success at work.

Social media are virtual spaces where you do not meet real friends, you do not meet anybody in the sense of actually meeting them, but you contact people you would have otherwise never “met”. Can you measure the ROI of that, or do you really want to measure it all? This is also one of the most important differences between a social media campaign and a social media strategy. In a campaign you measure $ while devising a strategy you set other, more important goals that are not measurable by such simple metrics like ROI but may pay out in manifold ways.

If you still want to measure something for a private blog ROI can be the number of comments on your posts. 5 comments by 5 people mean 500% blogging ROI.

Zen master Seo-ong Sangsun is the closest to my dream appearance

Tonight I had a dream. In the dream Zen master Seo-ing Singsun spoke to me. I could even ask him some questions. I was also able to memorize some of them and his replies. I decided to write down what I remember.

Zen master Seo-ing Singsun, there is CSS Zen, there is a Zen habits blog, Zen is everywhere on the Web, why is there there no SEO zen?

Seo-ing: There is SEO zen. SEO Zen always has been and always will be.

Tad: How is that? SEO without the Internet or search engines?

Seo-ing: 3 thousand years ago a young disciple asked his master: Where is the way to enlightenment?

Tad: What did the master reply?

Seo-ing: He replied there are about 894,000 results for where is the way to enlightenment.

Tad: Oh well, then it’s not as easy.

Seo-ing: There are many ways to enlightenment but you have only one master.

Tad: You mean, you?

Seo-ing: You are your own Zen master, I’m just part of your dream.

Tad: Interesting but confusing. Maybe you can tell me the difference between SEO and SEO 2.0?

Seo-ing: Look at the two stones, which one is faster?

Tad: Well, they are both lying on the floor.

Seo-ing: Right, now pick one of them up and throw it away.

[I throw the stone as far as I can]

Tad: So what now?

Seo-ing: This is the difference between SEO and SEO 2.0

Tad: I have to think about that.

Seo-ing: Do not think. Sing.

Tad: Sing?

Seo-ing: Does the bird think?

Tad: Probably not.

Seo-ing: Does the flower think?

Tad: ….

Seo-ing: Does the river think?

Tad: ….

Seo-ing: So what do you think?

Tad: Sing?

Seo-ing: You think again.

Tad: Last question for today. What do you think about authority links. Do we have to focus on them?

Seo-ing: What do you do if you want to cross a river?

Tad: Use a bridge?

Seo-ing: There are two bridges, which bridge do you take, the big one by the famous architect or the small one made of wood by inhabitants of the nearby village.

Tad: The famous architect’s?

Seo-ing: I take the wooden bridge.

Tad: Thank you Zen master Seo-ing Singsun.

Of course this dream was not as clear as these words might suggest. I tried to reconstruct it. So it might contain some mistakes. Some wisdom got probably lost in the process.

My unique point of view, being a veteran blogger from Germany, I started “late”, in 2003, while reading blogs since 2001, allows me to spot trends more clearly. Why? Germany is generally speaking 1-3 years behind the overall Web or the English speaking blogosphere. So the latest trends of blogging will arrive much later and what is new in many cases does not (yet?) exist in Germany.

So based on my cross-culturality I collected the top 10 blogging trends that are really hot in the English speaking blogosphere as of march 2008 while they are barely or non-existent in Germany.

The one most striking overall trend is the establishment of new, strong performing niches.

The niches that literally exploded recently are:

1. Social media blogs
While there have been plenty of blogs dealing with social media already for a while, they rather dealt with the entrepreneurial perspective it seems to me. In recent months plenty of social media blogs appeared on the scene which cover social media bottom up.

2. Green blogs
Green blogs, in the ecological sense, dealing with the environment, sustainability and products that have a lesser impact on nature are around for a while but there are much more popular and main stream by now. Also there seems to be more of them each day.

3. Self improvement and personal development blogs
Basically before I started blogging in English, I wasn’t even aware of the term self improvement. When I finally noticed the the”Zen of everything” blogs I assumed that they’ve been around for yours, but they haven’t, at least many of them. Zen habits is only a year old but already a Technorati Top 100 blog. There are really numerous self improvement blogs out there and each day they seem to be more of them. I love them all!

4. Productivity and lifehacks blogs
While I have been aware of Lifehacker for at least two years it has become one of the most popular blogs worldwide. Also I have seen many more productivity blogs spring up. Some but not all of them cross over to the self improvement niche or they overlap with freelancing blogs.

5. Freelancing and work at home blogs
A whole new movement of self-employed and proud of it bloggers is out there. Some of them are mothers working at home and blogging while rearing up their children at the same time, others are people who quit their regular jobs. Blogs like Freelance Switch or Freelancer Folder have been leading a new movement it seems.

There are also at least two niches which have a very difficult time instead:

6. Make money online blogs
There has been a significant backlash against make money online bloggers. Most social media boycott them while many Internet users assume that make money online blogs want to earn money off their visitors instead of teaching them how to make money themselves. Some bloggers thus crossed over to other niches like the work at home niche or rebranded themselves as marketing or SEO blogs. There are still plenty of new make money blogging blogs but they end up in an overcrowded niche facing an increasingly wary public.

7. SEO blogs
While not as hard hit by the anti-make money online blogs backlash, an increasing number of SEO blogs out there has to deal with a rather limited niche. SEO only topics are not more popular than they have been a year or two ago. People are rather interested in social media or overall marketing it seems. Many SEOs also fail to grasp the concept of blogging while concentrating on the SEO too much. No SEO can cure lack of great content or audience.

Also there have been trends which have emerged disregarding the blogging niche:

8. Professionalization
Bloggers are getting professional at an incredible pace. WordPress themes looking like magazines accelerate this process while highly organized and visionary bloggers appear seemingly out of nowhere and get famous in months. Skellie and Think Simple Now are two great examples of that.

9. Ebooks and video
It seems that all great bloggers either sell an ebook, give one away for free or prepare one. Bloggers turn to publishers as also video is more widely used as a new channel by bloggers filming themselves while speaking to the audience.

10. Positivity
The most positive blogging trend is positivity itself. While in Germany popular bloggers flame others and complain how messed up everything is, the English language blogosphere appears to be in a frenzy of achievement, collegiality and cooperation. I am really proud to be part of it.

Of course this list is highly biased due to the subjectivity of my unique point of view, but looking at the international blogging community from the dark corner of Germany makes me really see a bright future for enthusiastic individuals determined to offer a great blog reading experience to international audiences.

In a way it feels a little like the early days of the Web when everything was still fresh and empowering.