How Has The Pandemic Affected Blogging?

Now that the pandemic has come to an end (because apparently a small group of people can decide these things these days) I’d like to reflect on the question of how has the pandemic affected blogging?

All of us being at home with easy living, easy money coming in from the government, and very little practice with social skills or any motivation to go out has left a massive impact on us bloggers.

For me the solution to eternal boredom has been a mixture of journaling, writing, golf and going to the gym and of course as it goes in life, “what you water grows” … right?

Over the past two years I’ve seen new bloggers emerge successful and others fall off, with the usual insanity of new TikTok and instagram stars too.

So in this post I’ll summarize how the pandemic has affected blogging from all angles I’ve observed, with the hopes at least a few folks will see shifts in blogging and be able to use it after you create a blog.

If you’ve seen shifts in blogging or the online world too, let us know in the comments!

Table of Contents

Because the questions the post attempts to address of “how has the pandemic aka covid19 affect bloggers and the blogosphere” is such a massive question to ask with so many potential answers, I’ve broken down the post into these 4 categories.

• Affiliate Marketing
• Remote Work
• Live Chat Support
• Major Publications
• Bloggers In and Bloggers Out

As usual, it’s highly likely Greg left out a huge area you’re interested in (I’ve grown forgetful and regularly experience blogging and blog comment overload lately) so if you think there’s a 6th category of blogging change then please let me know down below.

I’ve gone ahead and lead with affiliate marketing as I’m betting that creating new income streams and saving your hard earned money is the most important topic to most of the readers here.

Affiliate Marketing

The pandemic has had a HUGE impact on affiliate marketing, but it’s come in at least a few phases.

For starters, at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone started a blog.

I mean typical days in blogging involved over 100,000 new blogs starting on wordpress.com, wordpress.org and the other best places to blog, but the pandemic made this number ratchet up at least 3 fold.

As a result, affiliate marketing related to blogging products also rocketed up because people needed new hosts, themes, plugins etc.

So if you had a blog that used affiliate marketing as a way to make money blogging, you were in good shape for the first part of pandemic blogging.

However, this trend didn’t exactly last.

After 2020 waned, people grew tired and exhausted of staying at home blogging and the number of new blogs being generated fell off substantially.

Forbes reported that as people’s fears of the pandemic grew and grew, ad revenue suffered from the top of businesses down.

A clear example is how AirBnb traffic declined, so they spent less on ads, so bloggers promoting travel services eventually saw their ads paying off less.

The pre-pandemic world involved us all spending lots of a wide variety of goods and services, but the pandemic world really shrunk what we spent money on and thus shrunk ad and affiliate efforts put out by major brands, with some products vanishing all together.

In fact, as ad rev and affiliate rev seemed less attainable for bloggers, I had never seen so many new blogs go unmanned so quickly.

The new shift grew to more people just wanted to get out which lead to amplified presences on TikTok.

It really was sad to see people lose initiative in blogging, but I guess that’s to be expected when we really have so few outlets for distractions and generally don’t have very much interesting stuff to write about (because many of our lives got pretty boring during the pandemic).

The silver lining however was that blogs in niches that realllly benefited from the pandemic, niches like home improvement, real estate, personal finance, cars, and coupons really did dominate. So if you started a blog about these topics, you’re probably sitting pretty right now.

Remote Work

Well it’s no secret remote work has become all the rave in the past 2-3 years.

DearTraveler has gotten leads with several big firms in remote work doing social media management, and all of her friends in industries from banking to military work have seen their work go either hybrid or totally remote.

That of course means that getting a remote job is more competitive.

It also means that if you’re willing to go above and beyond and venture out into the real world, you can really stand out when others would rather stay at home.

Essentially, the relatively small world of remote work has boomed into becoming the dominant way of doing things.

The numbers are staggering too: PewResearch found that while before the pandemic 75% of American had never worked from home, after the covid19 outbreak set in, an average of one-in-3 workers worked only from home!

It’s so prevalent that even my therapist tried to push me to Zoom learning, which I always refuse! 🙂

Live Chat Support

I don’t know about you, but I have noticed a huge fall off in live chat support’s ability (or even desire) to help me post-pandemic.

It is truly awful trying to get Apple to help you reset or figure out anything.

In fact, the VHT blog discovered that one of the largest differences in pandemic era support chats was the need for escalation of the incident, lol!

And good luck talking to your bank about a late fee — its just brutal.

The one exception seems to be that HostGator still helps me fix anything or eveything in my cPanel, with WordPress plugins, or with email issues.

But that could simply be because I’m on their VIP list 😇 so who knows where to find good support really!

My personal belief is that companies – especially the fortune 500, have outsourced their tech support.

As a result (and there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing) the support folks don’t really understand issues as they may not have created the products or have all the recent updates.

One nice caveat is that us bloggers could take customer support into our own hard – afterall writing high quality tutorials that stand the test of time IS customer support at its finest!

So basically big firms have saved money sending their support elsewhere, while we get to waste time explaining things that previously wouldn’t have needed to take as long as they do now. Massive ugh.

Major Publications

Well it’s no surprise that major publications had their way with the pandemic.

Never let a good crisis go to waste is how the saying goes, right?

So as bloggers, if we were able to latch onto a major publication or get gigs higher up, there certainly was work.

Of course, without a personal connection it’s literally impossible to get those ins anymore.

But, I’d be super curious if any of you bloggers have had a success writing elsewhere or landed bigger gigs?

Or, maybe it’s just best for us to contribute to free resources like Yelp, Quora or Wikipedia, which found that journalists spent the most time combatting misinformation and providing entertainment than any other form of writing during the pandemic.

For me, even HuffPost won’t respond to the emails anymore as they’re pretty much satisfied talking one-sided politics and linking back to only themselves and their umbrella of blogs.

Bloggers in and Bloggers Out

Lastly, I’d like to give a shout out (or a shout goodbye, lol) to bloggers I noticed during the pandemic.

It was really awesome to read BySophiaLee every week, as she covered blogging tactics to grow your blog and some really simple yet unknown apartment hacks on Instagram. The entertainment she provided during the pandemic did not go unnoticed and the inspiration was tangible!

It was sad not hearing much from Derek Halpern as his social triggers blog really could have capitalized on the social effects of the pandemic, but his latest posts really don’t go past 2019.

It was cool watching Graham Stephan’s coffee hour on YouTube, because I love learning about real estate and personal finance more than ever now. He always keeps it fresh and interesting and I wonder if he knew blogging is the original means of passive income, before real estate 🤪.

Kinda sad not hearing from MarieTV and Marie Forleo during the pandemic, but she probably was creating bigger and better things off her blog.

Lastly, WPBeginner was a total win, with new posts every single week day even through all we went through together as bloggers. Just amazing work by their team.

So, which new bloggers did we miss? Your blog? LMK down below! 😉

Hear From You

Well, that was a lot of reflection, and it feels good to be back writing for you guys.

Like I mentioned above, journaling was one activity that really helped me stay sane and mindful during all the pandemic blogging because it slows time down and helps you feel accountable for what you accomplish today and tomorrow.

From your perspective, how did blogging get changed by the pandemic? What good and bad occurred for you? Let us know in the comments, can’t wait to chat!