The last year was certainly another busy one in the world of blogging. With more companies and individuals joining the fray than ever before, 2014 was a year that taught both newcomers and veterans alike a lot of lessons when it comes to how best to approach their craft.

If you're thinking about ramping up your blogging efforts in the New Year and beyond, this article, where we look at four of the biggest blogging lessons learned last year, might be for you. Learn from those already fighting in the trenches and heed such advice.

Google's Demise

With the new update to popular web browser Mozilla (News - Alert) Firefox switching the default search engine from Google to Yahoo (powered by Bing), bloggers everywhere showed something of surprise and panic in lieu of their search optimization strategies. If anything has come out of this lesson, other than that we might see more people and organizations turn away from Google (News - Alert) in the coming year, it's that bloggers can't depend on any one strategy when it comes to seeing their posts and content do well in search. Bottom line? Focus on putting out the best content you can and don't waste any more energy worrying about the wars between search engines.

You Can Thrive On Limited Resources

Most new bloggers are hoodwinked early on in the game into thinking they must be absolutely everywhere when it comes to promoting and plugging their content. 2014, however, saw seasoned bloggers finally come out and recognize that they get better results focusing on a few select channels and ignoring the rest. With bloggers pulling down Facebook (News - Alert) Pages and removing comment sections on blogs, blogging best practices are certainly changing.

Native Advertising

Native advertising, accepting paid content that matches your blog's editorial standards while likewise meeting your readership's expectations, grew a lot in 2014 yet few bloggers really understand it. Seasoned veterans in the blogging world that got acquainted with this relatively new monetization scheme seem pretty confident it will grow even further in popularity over the coming year as both sides get their needs met.

As burgeoning bloggers still relatively green in the game, it pays to learn everything you can about native blog advertising right now and set about seeing if you can't slowly implement it into your platform.

Usefulness to the Audience (News - Alert)

If 2014 helped to highlight some of the changes taking place in the blogging world between previous years and now then the one thing that still remained the same is the importance of a blog being useful to its audience. Taken from spectacular lessons in failure when it comes to annoying readerships with intrusive pop-up advertising, sponsored content and more, bloggers learned last year that a smooth user experience and great content trumps everything else when it comes to capturing hearts and minds.

Hopefully with these lessons first and foremost in your minds, the next year will spell another successful one in the world of blogging, helping to raise the quality of what's out there on the information super highway and helping to diminish that which is not.