When The Blogosphere Becomes Too Large

November 14, 2014 Blogging Guide

You probably do not really sit around thinking about the reality of the size of the online blogging community all that much. One reason is because you are likely too busy trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO of your own blog’s content to make it more searchable. However, if you pause for a moment and consider that millions of bloggers are adding new content to the blogosphere every minute of every day, this introduces a significant problem for both you and your blog.

In other words, millions upon millions of new blog pages are competing for readership, causing a very real and pernicious problem with the very idea of blogging itself as a sustainable part of most blogging efforts. Sure, this does not mean that blogging is likely to cease any time soon. But it does imply that there will come a time, in the not so distant future, when getting a readership on a blog will approach a mathematically theoretical impossibility.

Avoiding The Meltdown Of The Blogosphere

Now, no one can say for certain how long it will be before the blogosphere is so saturated with content that it will become next to impossible for readers to find new and unique content. Much of what exists on the Internet in the form of blog posts as it is is already heavily repeated content. Sure, people spin ideas and change the way they speak on the same subjects, but combinatorially speaking, there is only a finite number of ways that the same information can be re-rendered before the repetition of content becomes utterly unavoidable.

At such a theoretical limit, this will force search engines to only rank the most relevant unique material, and truncate all other repeated data as disposable and irrelevant to the already overburdened search procedures. Popular search engines like Google are already facing ranking problems of this nature, implying that relying on obtaining readers through popular search engine methods is a questionable practice even today, no matter how much time you spend optimizing the SEO of your blog content.

In other words, the blogging community is reaching a point where the only way your content is going to make it into the hands of new readers is if the one blogging actively goes out and recruits readers more directly than most bloggers currently do.

Directly Recruiting More Readers

Since the goal is to obtain a vast readership, one way to directly grab readers is to get featured on blogs that already have massive amounts of readers. Being a guest writer for blogs that manage to do well despite the over saturation of the blogosphere is certainly one of the best ways to maintain a readership. Such a tactic relies on taking your message to the crowd, rather than waiting for the crowd to not find your content on a search engine, because a premium listing will inevitably be far more expensive than it currently is today.

Alternatively, another way to push your blog content is to return to offline marketing tactics. At first this may seem counter intuitive, but for bloggers with valuable content and a desire to succeed in the industry, offline marketing of their blog ends up being a viable and often effective means to their blog’s survival. Daring to do what others will not make the effort to do is sometimes the big difference between success and failure in any industry.