It’s now confirmed that blogging won’t be a lucrative venture in future after many Kenyan bloggers opted to quit the profession. Blogging is becoming complicated each day and income is shrinking for most bloggers-the future looks blurred.
I started blogging in 2011 when competition wasn’t stiff. During those days, you could post anything and get massive readership.Ghafla,Nation,Standard and a couple of other blogs existed…majority of blogs you’re seeing now didn’t exist that time. I remember in Facebook, I could write any nonsense and receive hundreds of comments. But as time went by, competition became stiff, leading to loss of traffic to competitors.
A few years ago, blogs like Kenyaplex and Softkenya used to dominate in education niche,Ghafla was the king in the entertainment industry and Nation dominated the news segment but the entry of venas news,tuko and numerous other news blogs impacted negatively on traffic numbers to those old sites. Even with the increase of Kenyans using the internet, the future is not promising either as major media houses plan to launch new blogs in the country. What I foresee is an exit of bloggers who used to dominate the blogosphere a few years back.
There is something new bloggers didn’t experience. About 5 years ago, advertisers used to spend heavily on advertisement. They would approach AdSense with lots of cash. One advertiser could pay up to Ksh 100 per click. They purposely did this because they understood only few blogs existed. But things have changed. From the information I got, it’s not going to be business as usual.Currently,I hope you are aware of this,the average AdSense cost per click in Kenya is 0.03 and this figure might reduce to 0.02 in few years to come. This implies that for you to make over Ksh100,000 per month,you have to receive at least 800,000 page views per month.I wonder where you will get all this traffic yet Facebook is misbehaving.
Over the past 3 months,I am sure you have noticed a significant drop in Facebook traffic to your blogs.What will now follow is a drop in Twitter and Instagram traffic.This was purposely done by Mark Zuckerberg to force companies to spend more on sponsored posts.What does this imply?That if you don’t have cash,you won’t survive as a blogger.
I have seen a growing number of Kenyan bloggers using email marketing to increase their traffic numbers.Most of them are using ConvertKit(You can sign up for free here) to allow their readers to subscribe for automatic updates.This has helped boost traffic and fill the gap created by Facebook.Others have already purchased SEMrush plans in order to familiarize themselves with keywords and also have their content indexed.
All in all,in future blogging won’t be a lucrative venture in Kenya.It will only be sustainable when bloggers switch from AdSense to affiliate marketing.Affiliate marketing is not heavily dependent on traffic .
What is more heart breaking is that it will be extremely hard for new bloggers to break into the already saturated market.If you manage to receive 1,000 visitors per day,you will thank your God 1,000 times.
