It’s never too late to launch a blog

We’re proud to have launched a rebrand and complete redesign of Diabetes Strong this week – it’s the first website we’ve worked on that has both recipes and medical articles.

I love this website’s history as it’s a great example of how blogs undergo many waves of change and evolve to match their audience’s needs, align with the founder’s phase of life, and adjust to growth.

Initially, founder Christel Oerum started a personal blog about her experiences as a fitness enthusiast living with type 1 diabetes. When she struggled to easily find accessible information about exercise and healthy nutrition with diabetes online, the site became a place where she shared her advice as well as inviting experts from the diabetes community to contribute. The site kept growing into one of the largest websites in its niche. It was relaunched as a portal with comprehensive diabetes content fact-checked by a team of medical experts worldwide – helping people to live with diabetes more easily.

Speaking of history, I also love using the Internet Archive tool for a few reasons. You can type in any website address and see the page’s history – often going back many years. While it doesn’t work for every webpage or every iteration, it’s incredible to see what does exist there. Aside from curiosity and nostalgia, it can be a useful way to obtain content that wasn’t backed up elsewhere.

Blogs have been around since the early 2000s and have evolved so much over the years in technology, functionality, subject matter, purpose, and style. There have been multiple waves – initially, these were largely personal blogs, technology blogs, and political commentary blogs. The next wave was entertainment blogs, business blogs, and marketing blogs. Then came the mommy blogs, lifestyle blogs, and food blogs. While social media initially decimated the blog comment section, blogs and social media now complement each other.

With enough traffic, blogging has become a very viable business model thanks to well-paying ad networks and affiliate programs such as Amazon. The pandemic helped boost the growth of recipe blogs.

I recently spoke with a client whose young teen is looking to launch a blog as a source of income and it inspired me so much. I wondered what possibilities will exist for those starting a blog in 2024 and how those blogs will evolve as we all still look for more and more information online.

It’s never too late to start a new blog and share your story and expertise with the world.