Where are all those blogs???

Tons of people still have successful blogs. More than likely people dont have blogs because they dont know how to market them. These are the 95% of the people who fail online every year.

Ree Drummond from "Pioneer Woman" on Food Network still has a successful blog. It's how she got discovered

ADDITION:

Look at the "Google Trends" link you provided. These are all keywords that are relevant to people learning how to MAKE A BLOG or MAKE MONEY WITH BLOGGING.

People like Ree Drummond has a blog about cooking, and recipes. Her blog members are looking for cooking ideas and recipes. They aren't there to learn about making money with blogging.

It seems that you're more on trying to make a point rather than getting your question answered. Blogs are still big these days. A lot of people, including me, use their blogs as their hub for traffic, relationship building and leads.

In fact, when I'm blogging and when I reference other bloggers, I noticed a huge spike in terms of successful bloggers. I've been blogging since 2011 and today, there are so many successful bloggers from all different kinds of niches. A lot of people now are more into paid ads for driving blog traffic with building a tribe as an end goal.

People still do SEO, but I believe more people are driven to boosing posts on fb. If you want to look for more blogs, then be more specific. Use long tail keywords. What you shared were keywords that are too broad.

It seems like you're seeking things that are not established and not yet popular. That's the problem -- the search engines favor sites that are already popular, already have traffic and already have lots of links. Finding the young, new, fresh talent is like finding a needle in a haystack until those bloggers start to get noticed. (Case in point: make a couple new blogs in the next week and write a few posts. Chances are you won't even find your site in the search results unless you type in the exact URL. I'm speaking from years of experience with this one, lol )

This thread really comes at a meaningful time for me.

The reason why I say that is because I am in the process of restructuring my entire business model for 2016.

I'm working with a very successful marketer whose products I have promoted quite successfully in the past, and he and I are working on a little JV which revolves around building a list from a blog with great content, with the main sources of traffic coming from Google, Bing, Facebook, and YouTube.

He and I have both come to the realization that people in the "Biz Opp/MMO" niche like us have to change the way we have been building our lists. For one, the AR companies are getting increasingly disillusioned with people in this niche, and I don't blame them.

Some of the list building tactics I've seen over the past two years are absolutely horrific. Emails with only one or two lines of content, ridiculous misleading headlines, outrageous income claims, rampant cross-list promotion (ad swapping, click banking), are just some of the "bad practices" that we feel will probably be outlawed by the AR companies (some are already).

So what's the answer? Ditch the niche? NO WAY. We know the niche is super profitable. However, it has to be done right.

I'm predicting that the time of "churn & burn" list building is rapidly coming to an end. Those marketers who do not have alternate list building systems in place will be left in the dust.

Some preliminary stats indicate that leads that land on your blog from search engines and social media and like your content so much that they opt-in just to receive blog updates (no freebie) are probably the best leads you can hope to get in this particular niche.

We have an IM blog right now that we just set up about 3 weeks ago. Traffic has been slow so far, but we are seeing some organic traffic from Google and Bing and our review videos are also bringing in traffic from YouTube. We've got around 60 leads who have signed up for updates through our exit-pop alone (does not include other leads who have used other forms on our blog to get free lead magnets).

We put up a review post the other day and the blog broadcast to just 60 leads brought 17 opens, 14 clicks, and 2 sales. That might not sound like much, but look at the stats:

Open rate: 28%
CTR: 23%
Sales conversion: 14%

Does anybody get those stats from ad swaps, click banking, or solo ads? Not likely.

It's my hope that scaling this up will continue to bring these results.

I believe this is because that many of us focusing on a specific location-based niches. So this could be the answer.