Some of the most popular blogging platforms have only emerged recently. For example, Medium is a daily destination for millions of internet users and the blogging platform of choice for a growing group of individuals and businesses. Just four years ago, Medium didn’t exist.

Also forcing change on the world of blogging are the social networks that, in recent years, have evolved from narrowly-focused content aggregators and sharing sites into elaborate content management systems of their own. Whether microblogging on Twitter, or posting long-form content on Facebook using a much-improved Notes feature, the line between social sharing and blogging has been significantly blurred.

Blogging, too, has also continued to evolve from a leisure activity one might engage in to share a passion or record their personal hopes and dreams and towards a legitimate career choice for talented content creators. While ‘blogging’ might have only been entered on a resume under ‘Hobbies and Interest’ in 2006, in 2016 it is just as likely to be found under ‘Work Experience’ on the same document.

But where is all this change leading?

And what other changes can we expect to see on the blogging landscape in the 12 months ahead?

Here are the five trends that will impact significantly on blogging in the year ahead, and how smart content marketers can take advantage of each to deliver value for their readers, grow their audience, and use their corporate blog to develop more and better leads.

How can you have a blog without a blogger? The simple answer is ‘you can not’, but that is exactly what we’ll see in the year ahead. Not fewer people blogging, but fewer people describing themselves as bloggers. Instead, we’ll read more and more about influencers.

This makes sense. Bloggers today are not simply writers looking for an outlet. Instead, they draw together text, images, online video, knowledge of pop culture and trends, business savvy, powerful and extensive social networks, and the skills to bring all of this to bear in a dynamic zeitgeist to deliver value for their audience, advertisers, and themselves. “Blogger” just doesn’t seem big enough to corral this diverse skill set, and when outreach is your career and your focus is on adding value, “influencer” seems so much more appropriate.

For those who see their blog as a tool by which to monetize their network, ‘influencer’ might be a synonym for ‘gun for hire’. For others with established distribution platforms and channels for their work – for example, television, books, or film – might see their blog as a chance to influence sales and conversions elsewhere. For those who will spend much of 2016 running for elected office in the United States, their blog is nothing less than a blatant appeal for influence upon the votes of millions of Americans.

And all of this suggests that 2016 might sound the death knell for the blogger and the arrival in force of the influencer.

The size of the post, that is.

With more people than ever getting their information online, blog posts and articles need to cut through the noise and deliver real value. And frankly, it’s the rare 200-word piece that is going to be as useful to the reader when faced with competition from extensive, data-backed 2000 to 3000-word pieces.

Orbit Media Studios surveyed more than 1000 leading bloggers and found that the average length of a post in 2015 was 900 words, an increase of 100 words or more than 10% over the year before. As marketing expert Ann Handley has said, “To thrive in an over-saturated content world, you’ll need to constantly write or produce (and syndicate) content with depth. Longer posts, more substantive content that people find useful and inspired.”

In 2016 you can expect to see this trend towards longer posts and more substantive articles continue. ‘Click bait’, thanks to the efforts of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other search engines and content aggregators, is likely to die out, and low-value ‘listicles’ are likely to go the same way.

For companies and even individuals that are looking to bring in qualified traffic this coming year, there will be a greater emphasis on the length of the article being published as well as its value. While size isn’t going to be the be-all-and-end-all of blogging, it will be an increasingly important element in proving value, seriousness, and expertise to curious visitors.

Let’s call this one the ‘reverse Instapundit’.

For many years Professor Glenn Reynolds’ blog Instapundit was known for two primary reasons: first, a link from the blog could send enough traffic to crash all but the most well-prepared sites with an ‘Instalanche’ of readers; and second, the blog was one of the few high-profile blogs that did not have a space for readers to comment on posts.

More recently, though, Reynolds has not only brought a suite of co-bloggers on board, he has also opened up the posts for comments by readers. The site has always had a large audience, and now that audience has more of a reason to stick around.

For most sites, though, there is reason to believe that 2016 will see the end of comments on blog posts as we have known them for the last 15 years. The reason? It’s not complicated, it’s social. In simple terms, comments are not what creators want to spend their time managing, and they are not where readers want to have their conversations.

Comments on blogs require either active moderation on the part of the owner, or an acceptance that the discussion underneath a blog post will quickly devolve into the cesspool of disagreement, name-calling, and abuse. For readers, too, there is a big disadvantage in commenting on many blogs. Not only is it one more password/login combination to recall or record, it is a conversation that is limited on an internet that is not.

This is why in 2016 we’ll see the conversation move to the social sphere, perhaps entirely. Want to make a comment on a blog post? Cite the URL and share it on Twitter. Blog owners will encourage comments on Facebook, either using a dedicated comment/conversation plugin, or syndicating their posts entirely on the big blue social network.

The conversations will continue, but they won’t be the comments we’ve come to know.

Just as, by year end, we’ll be referring to bloggers as influencers, we’ll also stop thinking about blogging as a text-based communications medium. While the trend is not towards the disappearance of text altogether – there is really very little that is as fast, convenient and efficient at transferring an idea in an asynchronous way than text – we will see bloggers and influencers use text less and graphical elements more.

In a sense, this move towards blogging with graphics and images mirrors a wider trend online towards graphical content. Social networks have long reported that content, status updates, and shares that include an image are viewed, shared, and engaged with at far higher rates than text-only content. And the growth of social networks and billion dollar companies founded on image sharing alone (think Instagram and Pinterest, or Shutterstock and Flickr, for example) suggest there is power in not saying a word, so to speak.

In 2016 this trend will see graphical content (including high-resolution images, infographics, design elements and icon sets, and images designed for sharing on social networks) come to the fore. Instead of images being secondary to a post or a writer seeking relevant images for their post in the wake of its drafting, images will become a more central feature of the blog post, with the trend towards Tumblr-style image-blogging expanding.

And here’s a prediction. The best content will combine two trends in blogging: great graphics and longer posts. Nobody wants to wade through a wall of text on a screen, and long slideshows are equally unpopular. But the combination of long form text with high-quality images that support and augment that text will be near irresistible.

In the past bloggers would brag about their traffic. The key statistics were unique visitors and page views, and the bigger the numbers, the better the blog. When your numbers climbed high enough you’d try and monetize, selling a bit of your screen real estate to AdWords or a display ad serving company. Times were good for high-traffic blogs, but there was trouble ahead.

As content creators realized that advertisers preferred eyeballs above all else, they started doing whatever they could to build massive audiences, no matter how temporary. Click bait, hate bait, listicles, low-value content, slideshows, memes, and sometimes just flat out content appropriation – OK, content theft – all reared their ugly heads. Traffic spiked but users were left unsatisfied – and advertisers, too. What was a win-win was now trending lose-lose.

Luckily, in 2016, this will start to turn around

The most important metric for bloggers in the year ahead will not be their traffic or their page views. It will be their engagement rates. Can the blogger attract readers – no matter the size of the audience – and keep them on the site? Can the blogger create a community, giving readers something to come back for other than just fresh writing and attractive images? Can a blogger press publish and be rewarded with Twitter shares, Facebook posts lauding the content, and the launch of dozens of discussions on social media? And can the blogger remain at the center of all of this?

Whether a small but dedicated niche audience or a community of hundreds of thousands of committed devotees, what will matter for bloggers in 2016 is the engagement rate of that audience – the higher, the better.

Blogging isn’t going anywhere and will continue to evolve in its role as one of the most important content creation, publication, and distribution strategies for businesses and individuals online. The trends in blogging outlined here are the most important in terms of their impact on the blogging landscape in 2016, but they are far from the only trends impacting bloggers and blogging generally.

It’s hard to believe that I started writing this blog yesterday while sitting at the airport in Atlanta between Rio de Janeiro and Indianapolis. The constant realizations that I have just ended my 20-year journey with USA Basketball. A day I knew would come, just not when… has officially come and gone.

Saturday was the last time that I will ever put on my #10 USA Basketball jersey and represent my country ON the court. A thought, that became a dream, which became a reality 20 years ago, officially came to an end. Gosh, where has time gone? Last week I started thinking about what my last day would be like, and Friday night and I forced myself to go to sleep early for fear my mind would wander aimlessly for hours and hours. Nonetheless, I woke up at the crack of dawn Saturday, replaying all of my years, thinking about the amazing players I’ve had a chance to play with, and even more so the great teams I’ve been apart of. Thinking about my journey of basketball and the impact that my fave coach ever, Pat Summitt, had on me. This whole last run- Gold and all, is for her : )

This trip to Rio has been a surreal one in thinking of the finality that it represents. At the beginning of the WNBA season everyone wanted to talk about what it would feel like playing in my last WNBA season and going through my last Olympics. Funny because back then it seemed like forever away… Now, it’s literally 36 hours past, and I feel a proud sense of closure.

Saturday morning I went upstairs to the deck to just enjoy the scenery and collect my thoughts and emotions one last time. As I was sitting there, one of my faves from USA Ball, Ellis, came over and we started talking and reflecting on our journeys within basketball. Ellis has been a part of USAB since 2005, so over the course of the last 10 years I have had an opportunity to get to know and hang out with him. It’s weird to think that I have been a part of USAB for more than half of my life. It has been a part of me, it has been in me, it has helped guide and mold me into the person and player that I am today. Wow!

So much has happened in my life over the course of 20 years. People and players have come, and some have gone. We have matured (some more than others LOL) and life has just happened. We went from the young wide-eyed ballers trying to learn the ropes, to the more experienced ones trying to leave our own handprints for the next generation to follow. We’ve been woven into the fabric of Team USA and what it means to represent something so much bigger than our respective WNBA teams, Collegiate teams, AAU, hometown, etc. We’ve gotten to represent the whole United States of America.

This last time around I told myself that I would get out more, that I would focus on things outside of basketball, and that I would spend as much time as I could with my teammates. Check, check, check… I feel like I have been able to “experience” it from a different light.

I’ve been able to get out and see different sites here in Rio while still staying caught up on all of my newfound friends via Team USA. Bonds have been created within the team and our families that will never be broken. Like I always say, “God puts us in places and situations for a reason.” For me, being here and able to spend my last Olympic journey with my husband and my family. This is the end of one journey, and the beginning of so much more.

The question I keep getting is “What was I feeling standing on that podium, and how do I feel now?” The tears were from the realization that this journey has come to an end. A legacy has been made, but my life off the court and in what ever’s next, has just begun. The emotions were just thankful ones of an opportunity to get to spend with such an elite group of the last 16 years representing the USA Senior Basketball Team. Tears of knowing my playing days with Sue, D and my other teammates have come to an end. Tears of all of the memories, all of the good times and more importantly of the legacy that I’ll leave for so many players that will come up behind me.

This Olympic experience, my Olympic journey has taken me to places that I never thought possible. It has provided me opportunities that I never knew I wanted, and it has given me friendships that I will forever cherish.

So, the tears and emotions… it’s for the ultimate ending of one chapter. But, the beginning of so much more : )

Til the next time… Best wishes and God Bless!

TC24