I’ve been searching recently to answer a question that many who are considering new online programs have asked: Just how many blogs are there, anyway?

Let me start by saying that hard, reliable data is difficult to find! Many of the services or engines that track individual blogs, especially Google, don’t share their information. Even for those that do share data, it’s still impossible to know if their lists are all-inclusive, or how many “dead” and zombie, or “sleeping” blogs they contain.

Dead means just what you think it means: the blog has been permanently abandoned or discontinued. Unfortunately, this is the fate of many blogs. Zombie or “sleeping” blogs are terms I just made up, because they seem to fit so nicely - blogs that are temporarily dormant, but will be revived by their owners at some point in the future.

So, you want a number, right? Well, the current estimates say there are about 400 million “active” English language blogs right now, but that number varies according to the source. (Technorati estimated about 200 million blogs at the start of 2009) Of course these numbers change every day, however, as new blogs are started by the thousands or tens of thousands every day, and a large number of blogs have also reached the point of where they could be defined as “abandoned” and should be subtracted. When including non-English in the total number, there may be over one billion blogs worldwide.

This is often because many business blogs, those written by small business owners or others who are responsible for specific company blogs discover that finding topics to write about, finding the time to actually write the posts, upload them, and adhering to an established publishing schedule is a lot harder than it seems at first.

That’s often the point where we are asked to step in and help many of our blogging clients, with our blog management services. And of course there are many other agencies or marketing freelancers around the country which do the same.

How many people read or follow all these blogs?

This question is just as difficult to answer, because there is no reliable tracking mechanism. But certainly we are talking about many hundreds of millions of people, maybe 500 or 600 million total. If you include non-English blogs, we can easily assume a number well above a billion people, perhaps even more than 2 billion, or about 1 out of every 3 human beings on the planet.

So it should go without saying that an active blog is absolutely VITAL to establishing a strong web presence for your company or brands, because this allows you to regularly share “fresh” content, the kind that has become key to solid search engine (SEO) rankings from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com and every other major engine…whose web crawlers are constantly seeking out and indexing new content.

Your blog is also a great source of fodder to utilize in those all-important Social Media Accounts, like Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, YouTube, and other niche networks like MySpace or various social bookmarking platforms.

In fact, it is quite difficult to conduct any type of social media campaign without a blog. With Facebook updates you are limited to 440 characters, Twitter only allows 140. This is not nearly enough to communicate many marketing messages, any detailed events or promotions, or share any type educational or resource-oriented content. This type of long form information is best shared via your blog, and then shared through your various social media platforms.

So if you’re asking yourself “Does the number of current blogs mean I shouldn’t bother with creating my own?“, your answer should be a definite NO!

Sure, for every niche there are going to be a few popular A-List bloggers. Some have even become media voices in their own right, rivaling offline competitors in terms of readers and potential advertisers. Guy Kawasaki comes to mind right away in the field of communication technology. John Mauldin is another, this time in the financial analysis and investment category. There are many others.

But because of the low barriers to entry, almost anyone can begin blogging. And even those who don’t have the time and resources to blog themselves can still hire firms like Hat Trick Associates to help them develop content ideas and take care of the writing and posting.

And as noted, some of the blogs that exist today, won’t exist tomorrow, for a myriad of reasons. So if you can stick to a blogging plan, eventually you will gain on your competitors just through perseverance!

This means there are many voices, and while certainly not everyone will achieve A-List status, each one can attract its own share of attention, and contribute to the ongoing conversation which is the web today.