How Blogging Has Changed Over the Past 6 Years

When I started blogging back in 2007 it was so easy. Writing on my blog was my way of escaping from reality. I would write a few paragraphs and forget about my newborn and postpartum depression for a couple of hours. Back then when I was still learning how to grow my blog, professional bloggers emphasized the importance of creating discussions on your blog through comments. The best way to get readers was to comment on other blogs. For the first couple of years I did that every single day. I spent all day commenting and about 50% of the bloggers returned my comments.

These were some popular posts from 2008-2009 that got a lot of comments.

Diet Soda Health Risks 16 comments
Wordless Wednesday – Sisters 39 comments
Healthy Moms Wants to Promote Your Blog – 14 comments

By 2010 promoting your blog shifted from commenting over to social media and blog giveaways became very popular. Fewer bloggers spent time commenting on blogs. Instead they were busy posting giveaways, promoting them and essentially “buying” their social media following through the giveaways.

I ran quite a few giveaways in 2010 and spent hours promoting them on giveaway sites like online-sweepstakes.com/. When I was busy promoting giveaways I only got comments on my giveaway posts but all the rest were ignored. Today, there are still bloggers who post giveaways every single day and require the participants to follow them on Facebook, Twitter etc and then leave a comment in order to enter.

In 2012 content writing and guest posting on popular blogs in order to gain back links became very popular. These writers work from home for clients who are trying to improve their SEO. Most of their clients are overseas. This is a very lucrative business which still continues today. I used to get 100 e mails every week from different content writers just wanting back links on my site. So I got smart and charged them for the links.

I made pretty good money off of these content writers, however in 2013 Google penalized my site for SPAM and my pagerank went down. When that happened I changed all my outgoing links to “no-follow,” and discontinued publishing guest posts.

Today in 2014 I am struggling to figure out the best way to promote and continue to grow my blogs. All of the old ways are no longer working for me. I spent the past couple of days commenting on hundreds of blogs only to get a fraction of comments in return.

I am growing my social media following organically and sharing every single post, however my page views are still lacking. I don’t know what I am doing wrong and I am seriously thinking about quitting this whole blogging thing. It takes up a lot of my time, I haven’t attracted any decent advertisers in a long time so I’m not making the good money that I used to. There just is too much competition in the mom blogging world and I think it is time for me to give up. Nobody comments on my blogs anymore, so I doubt they will miss me.

Have you ever thought about giving up on blogging?