Growth of the entire social media market is every content creator’s best hope for success. That means that bloggers in general need to continue to provide content on an ever-widening and growing field of topics and interests.

At the same time, social media enthusiasts need to continue to promote social media to any or all who are interested in order to grow the overall social media market. We’ll all benefit if that happens. Otherwise, the blogosphere will be engaging in the fierce market share wars that highlight the life of commodity producers in mature markets. And it’s pretty darned hard to compete on price when something is free.

So how do we keep growing the thing, looking at blogs in particular?

Leading Question

ReadWriteWeb’s Josh Catone asked the following question: do regular people really read blogs?

The answer to Josh’s question would seem to be no, or at least not many people do. It’s worth noting that his main source of information was a Harris Poll asking US adults about political blogs, but, as Josh also points out, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of data from 2007 or 2008 about blog reading statistics.

Let’s not forget one thing, though: the poll was limited to politics and political blogs. If long term voter trends in North America are any indication, interest in voting is waning, which could likely reflect declining interest in politics or political discussions (not withstanding The Huffington Post’s success at the top of the Technorati index). On the other hand, my general feeling is that readership of tech blogs continues to increase over time, and there are some other hot blogging areas that growing (perhaps mommy bloggers, making money online (there will always be a market for this), and business blogs in general).

(The comments section from Josh’s post, full of interesting insights, also spawned a thread at LinkedIn on the topic of blog reading that’s worth checking out.)

How to grow the blogging audience

I believe that we can increase the number of potential readers by focusing on five different areas:

Education – many people have heard what a blog is, but might not be able to tell a static website from a blog. They need to understand things like:

• reverse-chronological sequence of publishing, which is the reverse of the structure of a lot of other documents
• tags/categories
• searching
• pages
• comments
• RSS and news aggregators

These things are second nature to the vast majority of the current blogging audience, but some people don’t get it yet. Maybe a lot of people don’t get it yet. Marketing Ninja also has a relevant anecdote showing a situation where people preferred static documents (e.g. Adobe .PDF files) over blog posts at a ratio of 8:1 or more. There must still be a significant population of people who don’t, won’t, or can’t read online, although I don’t have any statistics to back this up. Even in my own case, there are many times when I’ll print out a blog post in order to read it later.

This brings up another good point: trust and reliability. Many people will put more faith in a professional-looking document than an amateur-looking blog, even if the blog happens to have better content. Old programming dies hard, sometimes.

Promotion of all kinds – create demand: virtually everyone in the world needs a telephone or access to one in order to conduct their business. By contrast, virtually everyone in the civilized world wants an iPod or other portable media player, but few actually need the device. However, the precedent started with the Walkman and Discman players evolved with the introduction of the digital media formats (particularly .MP3 and .MP4 files), creating desire that was satisfied with a revolutionary product both in design and capabilities. The growing number of media files, both professional and amateur, helped create demand for a new portable media player.

Blogs are like the “player” and good content will create demand for the “player”. However, we need to keep emphasizing things like portals, indexes, and search engines. Alltop, as I’ve written before, can only help to promote the blogosphere and social media in general. [Here's a post that can help you take advantage of what Alltop offers]

Cross-promotion between bloggers, even those in the same niche, needs to continue to maximize eyeball exposure.

Value - put simply, bloggers need to provide content that other people would want to read or find useful. We don’t need spam, we don’t need a lot of echoes, we need new, fresh, and useful material. This material needs to appeal to beginners, intermediates, and experts.

Unfortunately, the blogosphere could also be called the spamosphere due to a lot of content which is designed as platforms for online advertising sales instead of valuable content. Give people material that they both want and need!

Diversity - related to value, we need to broaden the subject matter, or at least provide more valuable content across a wider range of topics. We may be digging deep into the fabled Long Tail into increasingly smaller and specialized niches, but we need more good (hopefully original) content suitable to an increasingly wider audience. Fortunately, ongoing innovation and new product launches offer a continual supply of blogging source material. We also need more material about everyday items that affect broad groups people, both within and outside the tech realms.

Opportunity - more high speed Internet and wireless access; cheaper hardware and software; ease of use. As Steven Hodson recently pointed out, what may be seen as inexpensive to some may be a prohibitive cost to others. There’s talk of $100 or $200 laptops for developing countries… maybe there’s a lot of opportunity for these in the Americas and Europe as well. In addition, inexpensive high speed Internet access is not ubiquitous, even within the Americas. My parents have only had access to medium speed Internet during the past two years and they live about 10 KM from my home. Mobile phone Web use is predicted to drive demand and may be a cheap alternative; however, this could remove any incentive to produce cheaper desktop PCs and laptop PCs.

The rising tide

The phrase “a rising tide that lifts all boats” was not coined by US President Bill Clinton, although he and his executive team made significant use of the phrase during his presidency. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

…is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy, and that economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on the general macroeconomic environment first and foremost.

Substitute the word “blogosphere” for “economy”, remove the references to government and policy, and the concept holds true for blogging. Broaden the potential blogging readership base and you help prevent commoditization. We can enlarge blog readership by following the five suggestions that I’ve presented.

Everyone can win.