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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

We encourage you to get involved in our blog community - so share your opinions and experiences by leaving comments on our posts.

If you're looking for help with promoting your website - check out our range of affordable search engine marketing services.

Thursday, August 10

Blogosphere Growth Continues to Explode

The blogging world has been growing at an unprecedented rate, with the number of Weblogs now 100 times larger than three years ago.

Technorati, a recognized authority into weblogs, have been tracking the blogosphere since November 2002, and recently recorded its 50 millionth blog. According to David Sifry, weblogs are doubling in size approximately every 200 days, and from January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs tracked by Technorati has continued to double every 5-7 months.

What's more amazing is that close to 175,000 blogs are being created each day, with eight percent of these being considered spam blogs (splogs). If you put that into perspective, then on average there are more than two new blogs starting up every second of the day.

The number of blog postings also continues to grow, with approximately 1.6 million people posting blog comments every day. That's close to 18.6 posts per second, nearly doubling the posting volume from a year ago.

Interestingly, last time David Sifry observed the State of the Blogosphere, I was surprised to see that in terms of language distribution, Japan had the highest percentage of postings (31 percent) compared to 25 percent of English postings. This time around however, English postings accounted for 39 percent, with Japanese posts following closely behind with 31 percent. Chinese came in at third with 12 percent of total postings.

How long can this tremendous growth continue? Only time will tell...

How does this affect your business?

It's very easy for your customers to share their good and bad experiences with your company through blogging. This can provide you with great free publicity or get you into big trouble. Are you currently monitoring if your company is mentioned in blogs? If not, start doing it. Sites like bloglines.com or technorati.com are good places to start.
Blogs make it very easy for people to create online content - so search engine databases are getting more and more crowded and you'll have to fight harder and harder to maintain or improve your rankings. When was the last time you re-optimized the site or added new content yourself?
Are you blogging yourself or do you have a company blog? As you can see by the fact that ineedhits is blogging, we think it is a great way to provide our users with up-to-date search marketing news and SEO tips, and provide our readers with a forum where they can comment and ask questions. You can use a blog to give your company a personality, make it more accessible, or demonstrate your expert knowledge in your profession. So it should be a good way to get prospects to know you and your company and convince them to do business with you.
Don't feel forced to blog though - if you don't think you have anything to add to blogs that are already out there, or if you are dealing with issues that need to remain confidential (think defense industry), it's probably best if you give it a miss.

Blogging will certainly not go away, so it is definitely a good idea to have at least a basic understanding of blogs. We will do a full length DIY tip on business blogging soon, but in the meantime we highly recommend Robert Scoble & Shel Israel's book on blogging called "Naked Conversations". You can find out more about Robert and buy his book at his blog http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/.