Let's begin with a quick pep talk.
Making a success of your blog can seem like an uphill struggle. It's easy to be disheartened in the early days because success rarely happens overnight. One of the first psychological stumbling blocks for many bloggers is the overwhelming size of the blogosphere. It's easy to feel like a small fish in a very big pond. But, that's not necessarily the case.
It's true, the blogosphere is a crowded place, with millions of blogs out there all clambering for attention.
The statistics are mind-boggling.Technorati, the leading blog directory, claims it is tracking in excess of 112 million blogs, with over 175,000 new blogs created daily and 1.6 million new postings per day (see http://technorati.com/about/ for the latest data, as the figures will almost certainly have increased by the time you read this).
It's actually very difficult to be precise about the number of blogs out there. The 112,000,000 blogs quoted above are just those being tracked by Technorati and not all of them will be active. Putting an exact figure on it is largely an academic exercise (as you'll see from my attempt, below). The point here is that the blogosphere is big and getting bigger by the second.
At first this seems a little daunting. You may be wondering how you can stand out in such a crowded arena. With so much live information being constantly updated, is there room for any more? Does the world need another blog? Is the web-surfing public in danger of reaching blog-saturation or information-overload? I believe the answers to these questions are yes, yes, and no, respectively.
When you break them down, the numbers become a little more reassuring. Many of the 122 million blogs being tracked by Technorati are inactive—we can deduce this from their own statistics. 1.6 million new posts per day works out at just 0.014 postings per blog, per day. If we assume that for a blog to be considered active it needs at least one new post per week, we'd expect that figure to be more like 0.14. In which case, the total number of active blogs is around 11.2 million.
OK, that's some pretty rough and ready arithmetic, but it highlights the point that most blogs out there are, in fact, dormant. This effectively thins out the blogosphere and adds weight to blogs like yours, which are regularly updated.
11.2 million is still quite a big number, but when you consider the size and diversity of the global web audience (currently estimated at around 1,250 million), hopefully you can see there is room for you and your blog. Yes, there are a lot of blogs out there, but there are also a lot of web users hungry for information.
As well as being big, the blogosphere is also diverse. However, there are millions of blogs, which cover an enormous spectrum of subjects and genres. The blogosphere can be almost endlessly segmented, which adds even more weight to your activities as a business blogger. You're not competing for audience share against the blogosphere as a whole. Like most bloggers, you'll find your niche and realize success is within your grasp.