Can Blogging be the next IT?

The IT revolution with all its plus and minus has been a wonderful journey for India. It has created jobs, given us hope and more importantly a confidence that we can compete with the best in the world. The IT revolution seems to be slowing down due to several reasons including a backlash against outsourcing in the developing countries in the wake of the global recession.

I have been studying the pagerank profile, alexa rank, overall ranking and earning details of Indian bloggers with a lot of interest over the last few months. Based on these studies and my interactions with emerging bloggers like Pavan, Ajay, Abhishek, Nihar, Tarun and Harsh I am becoming more and more confident that blogging as a profession and business will create even more opportunity than what IT has done for India in the last few years.

I am aware that, it is quite a big statement to make and I do not expect you to accept my words at face value. Hence in the paragraphs that follows, I shall be putting forth my logic for coming to the consclusion above. This is going to be a rather longish post. Hope you have some time on your hand to go through it completely.

1. Large pool of english speaking population: Actually blogging requires English writing skill and we have an even larger pool of English writing population as students from Tier-II, Tier-III cities are perfectly ok writers while they struggle in the spoken english department.
2. 24 X 7 development cycle: In software development working on 24 X 7 time schedule was a choice. Companies embraced the idea to decrease the time to market. However in the online world 24 X 7 is a necessity.
3. Blogging needs zero capital investment: What was great about IT business was the low capital requirement compared to traditional manufacturing businesses. This allowed the entrepreneurial middle class professionals to set up IT companies. Blogging does not need any capital what so ever. That has allowed students and IT profeesional in India to create blogs and earn money from it.
4. Large pool of engineers ready to work for a lower salary: The recession is only going to increase that number. Aspects like Search engine optimization, analytics etc are predominntly logical tasks that can be carried out by Indian engineering students with a lot of ease.
5. Blogging will generate oppurtunity for students of other streams as well: Job creation in IT was restricted to engineers alone. Blogging by its very nature will provide a great opportunity to students of other streams like arts, designing etc.
6. Blogging is independent of cultural bias: In the early years of IT revolution, Indian companies had to fight the negeative bias of their clients about the quality standard of Indian companies. Luckily in the world of blogs, each post is judged by its own merit alone.
7. Blogging does not need no Visa: I do not need to be in the USA to blog about US. If your blog is good, no government will stop its citizens from reading your blog, clicking on your advertisement or buying products from you.

Challenges for Blogging becoming the next IT

1. Our habit of getting paid at the end of the month: We are accustomed to working in an office and getting paid at the end of every month for the work we have put in. Unfortunately blogging does not work that way. I had to put in close to 6 months of blogging before I started to make any money.
2. Our reluctance to learn marketing: Blogging is not about writing great content alone. To be a successful blogger, you need to promote those posts, convince others to link to you and convert the readers into subscribers. I see a distinct reluctance amongst Indian bloggers to take up these other aspects of blogging.

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