The coronavirus crisis has forced many professionals to rethink their career choices. Bloggers are no different. In this article, we discuss whether blogging is a safe career choice during the coronavirus crisis.
The current pandemic crisis has been sobering and humbling in many respects. Professionals in many fields have forced to reconsider the convictions they had about a career in their respective fields. A game changing event like the current pandemic leaves most sane minded professional into a reevaluation of career goals and aspirations.
Those with dreams of becoming successful bloggers are no different.
On first glance, one would look at the field of blogging and think that a crisis like the one we currently face will have little impact on the field. However, it is important to dig deeper and understand the true impact blogging as a field has faced due to the coronavirus crisis.
How Has the Coronavirus Crisis Affected Blogging?
The impact of the coronavirus crisis can be viewed from two angles.
The first angle is related to traffic.
Due to the crisis, a lot of niche and topics have receded into the background. If you were running a blog covering sports news for instance, the number of people coming to your blog must have gone down. This is naturally because there are no sports events happening right now and people in general are not very interested in sports at the moment.
Certain niche and topics which fall into this category are naturally going to face a real fall in traffic numbers.
Then there are blogs that are getting increased attention and traffic. The trend of home recipes and cooking is example of a niche that has been aided by the coronavirus crisis.
As you can see, the question of traffic increasing or decreasing is varies. Any niche which has relevance to the home-based life of an individual is likely to get more traffic compared to a more outdoors niche.
As far as traffic is concerned, the impact of the coronavirus crisis is too hazy to nail down at the moment.
The other angle to view the impact of the coronavirus crisis on blogging is monetization.
Most blogging entrepreneurs are in this line of work to make money. The blogosphere is a very serious industry filled with highly talented bloggers who control the conversation in their respective niche. The ultimate aim is to create value in the form of money.
There are many different ways bloggers monetize their blog. Sadly, the coronavirus crisis has crippled all blog monetization techniques.
Whether its affiliate marketing or ad monetization, all income streams have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. Affiliate networks like Amazon have cut commission rates to cut costs during the crisis. Ad networks are facing losses are advertisers are pulling out due to an unprecedented funds crunch.
The entire world is suddenly ground to a halt. It is no surprise that bloggers have had to suffer as well.
Thus, while it is still unclear that the blogging community in general is facing a traffic crisis, it certainly is right facing a funds crisis.
This makes the question even more serious – is blogging a safe career option during the pandemic crisis?
What Does a Safe Career Really Mean in Times Like These?
People have varying opinions when they say the phrase ‘safe career’. To some, a safe career means something entirely different compared to others.
The general opinion is this – a safe career option is one where there is ample job security.
Job security is not merely associated with fields where employees are not let go easily. Instead, job security refers to fields where professionals can easily find new jobs in the unlikely scenario they lose their jobs in the first place.
Thus, a safe career option is one where professionals have safe jobs, and in the unlikely event that they lose their jobs, they can easily find a new one.
In reality, finding a profession where all these conditions are met is frankly difficult. There are many factors which contribute to how hiring and recruitment in a given field is shaped. One of the main factors is employability.
Employability simply refers to the standard of professionals available in the labor market. When employability is high, it means that the available professionals are skilled and talented enough to be employable. When it is low, the professionals are naturally not ready to be hired.
Employability numbers in India are depicted in the following chart –
Percentage employability in the last five years (Data collected from the Economic Times)
As you can see, employability numbers have grown in India in the last five years. However, it is again important to point out which sectors have been the major recruiters in the last five years.
| 2014 | Banking and Finance, Pharma, and Telecom |
| 2015 | Hospitality, Banking and Finance, Oil, Gas, and Steel |
| 2016 | Retail, E-commerce, Pharma, Healthcare, and transport |
| 2017 | Oil, Gas, Software, Hardware |
| 2018 | Banking, Finance, and Retail |
| 2019 | Banking and Finance, Software, Hardware, and Manufacturing |
As employability has grown, one can relate this growth to the hiring in the major sectors listed in the table. It is right to suggest that these are the fields that have benefited from the increase in employability. An increase in hiring suggests that these companies are looking to expand their workforce while also rewarding those who stay with them for a longer time. Thus, a safe career by looking at the above chart and table could be in any of the fields listed above.
Is Blogging a Safe Career Choice Right Now?
If you’re reading this during the coronavirus crisis, you live in times when every field of work in in the doldrums. It is as if the world has pulled down the shutters and receded into the surface.
At this point in time, every career choice will feel unsafe. Every economy in the world is reeling under the impact of this crisis. To ask the question whether a career is safe is probably not the right one at the moment.
One way to answer this question is to look back in history. This is not the first crisis the world as a whole has ever seen. Pandemics have come and gone before. Some professions survive the impact of a brutal pandemic while others don’t. The same question can be asked of blogging – can it survive this crisis?
The answer is yes.
Unlike other fields, blogging is highly decentralized. It is not as if there is a central authority which monitors and certifies bloggers. Anyone has the power to create a blog and publish new content to attract people. This lack of organization is a boon for the blogging as a field. This is because the fall of no single authority or blogger means the falls for every other blogger in the field.
Every blogger is independent of the fate another blogger faces. This means, bloggers have their fate in their own hands. To survive a crisis, they can write better unique content or even step out of their own field to target a niche more capable of generating revenues in a time of crisis. Compare this to another more formalized field, the impact of coronavirus can be deadly as the fall of the first one or two dominoes can spell the doom for an entire industry.
Look at the fields covered in the table listed earlier. All of the fields listed in the table are either punctured by the coronavirus pandemic or are overwhelmed by the demand for their services (healthcare).
Thus, a crisis like the current one is often a great equalizer and a killer of conventional wisdom. Blogging is a safe career choice because it gives the professional involved the freedom to choose any subject to write content on. There is also no fear of getting fired or being caught in bureaucracy typically involved in large companies as each blogger is responsible for his/her own success.
Is there a demand for the blogging space to exist?
As long as people go online to look for something, bloggers will continue to thrive. Content will always be needed to answer the queries people have. The nature of these queries may vary at different points, but bloggers would be needed to create content and make the internet whole.
Remember, without content, the internet can fit inside a matchbox. When people come online, it is content that drives their experience and keeps them online. The success of most major tech platforms like Google, Facebook, and so on has been based upon their contribution to making content discovery and consumption much easier than it has ever been.
So yes, blogging is a safe career choice. It is up to those who take up blogging to choose a niche which performs well and is sustainable.
Why Blogging and Other Digital Marketing Career are underappreciated?
There has recently been a reevaluation of careers in blogging and digital marketing. As stated earlier, it is natural for there to be a reevaluation of career choices and industries during this pandemic crisis.
However, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that there has been a greater push in questioning those with a career built in digital marketing and blogger. After all, how many articles and blogs have you see that question careers in the automobile sector of civil engineering, both fields that have been on the decline for many years?
Why is a career in digital marketing and blogging doubted more compared to other more mainstream fields?
The answer lies there – mainstream.
Even though blogging and digital marketing have grown as fields in the last five to ten years, they are yet to be considered a part of the professional and educational mainstream. There are no popular degree or diploma programs associated with digital marketing. There is no single role model in digital marketing that has become a thought leader in the mainstream. These are the reasons why digital marketing is not in the mainstream.
When something is not in the mainstream, it is naturally viewed with greater scrutiny. Even though fields like mechanical and civil engineering are faltering and falling in India, they still remain immune to any serious type of analysis because they are codified into the mainstream. Most engineers know it is difficult to get a good starting job as a core civil or mechanical engineer. In fact, people now have a better chance at getting a stable digital marketing job compared to a mainstream career in a falling sector.
Becoming part of the mainstream is a matter of time and consistency. When compared to other fields, digital marketing is doing much well despite the coronavirus crisis. Brands and companies are shoring up digital marketing campaigns to reach out to people during these troubled time and building a loyal base of followers and leads.
The reasoning is simple. Digital marketing can still be performed as a practice as it is done over digital platforms and not in person. Furthermore, traditional mediums of marketing are dying out due to the pandemic as people are spending more and more time online. Every smart company in the world knows it cannot just stop marketing efforts for two or three months. Thus, if traditional marketing won’t work at this point in time, a blogger or digital marketer naturally becomes a highly valuable professional to have.
In Conclusion
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic will be etched in the memory of several people who are living through these troubled times. The crisis has forced professionals in many fields to reevaluate the career choices they have made. Bloggers are no different. In this article, we discussed whether blogging remains a safe career option considering the crisis that is rampaging across the world.
About the Author – Kapil Heera is an entrepreneur and SEO specialist, his experience as a marketeering totaling to more than a decade. He has been at the helm of Kapil Heera Academy for many years now and has used his knowledge and skills to make it one of the best digital marketing institutes in Delhi.