Is Blogging Dead? Yea, Kind of…

Pack it up everyone! Shut down WordPress and stop sending out checks Amazon Associates and Google AdSense. Didn’t you hear? Blogging is dead.

This sort of headline and topic has been in circulation since early 2010.

Each year, people talk about how blogging is dead and that you should move on to other forms of marketing. Before, it was all about how social media would kill off blogging and how YouTube and video creation would make blogging irrelevant.

But a good blog, with great content and high rankings, is a valuable asset. So what is the reality? Is blogging dead

My answer is yes, it’s kind of dead, here is how you need to pivot.

Personal Blogging is Dead

Dooce.com is one of the original mommy bloggers and one of the first bloggers to become famous, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and landing multiple book deals.

Her writing is smart, funny, and brutally transparent. It’s like a real-life soap opera. It’s this excellent writing and drama that drew a massive audience to her blog. It’s this sort of blogging that is dead for most people. Writing about whatever you want, hoping and wishing to build an audience.

Don’t get me wrong, if you feel compelled to write, then write.

Writers write, and I would never want to discourage you from doing what you are supposed to do.

However, the overwhelming majority of people who visit my blog want to make money from blogging and want to know how this business model actually works.

If you’re more interested in creating a personal writing outlet that has readers, I would strongly suggest using a platform like Blogger for casual use or, better, a writing an email marketing platform like Substack.

The reason is because casual writing or writing about your passions tends to not lend itself to getting a lot of organic traffic. With Substack you’ll have a network of built in readers and a way to keep in touch with them through email marketing.

Outdated Blogging Advice

I launched DavidUtke.com in 2022. I’ve launched blogs for the last decade and blogging advice you’ll see online is incredibly outdated and often pushed by those who started their blogs 5-10 years ago.

What worked in the past does not work today and I want to share with you some common advice that does not work.

• Click bait headlines
• Posting a lot to get a lot of traffic
• Gust posting extensively
• Blogging about your personal life and thoughts

Click bait headlines

With blog posts, your headlines need to be clear and specific. They need to relate to the blog post directly, meet the particular search intent, and use distinctive keyword phrases that people use.

If you want to rank a blog post for Bluehost Review, for example, you need to create a catchy title with that specific phrase.

Just calling your blog post “Bluehost Review” will not cut it. It needs something like “Bluehost Review – The Stunning Truth.” At least that second title is more interesting.

So, as Google has gotten more sophisticated about ranking content for search intent, pure clickbait no longer works with blog posts.

Posting a lot to get traffic

Seth Godin made this type of blogging strategy famous. He initially used a free blogging platform called Type Pad but has since used WordPress. He has posted a 300 to 600-word blog post every single day for a decade.

That’s an excellent writing habit, but it’s not the secret to blogging success. He claimed that it was this consistency that made his blog famous.

Back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still relatively new, publishing a lot of content day after day made a difference. But in today’s landscape, publishing just for publishing’s sake is a waste of time.

Instead, it would help if you focused on creating helpful, searchable content. Content with some specific keyword focus so people can organically find your content. Because that’s why you blog today. To get search engine traffic that you can convert into product sales or email signups.

Just posting a lot of mediocre content will not help you get search traffic. Quality over volume is the reality of today.

Guest posting (with a caveat)

Guest posting used to be a very powerful strategy for building up authority and your rankings with a website.

If you could get content on other websites linking back to yours, it helped create authority for your website so that you would rank more quickly and easily.

Today, guest posting is a massive waste of time IF you’re not posting on high-traffic, high-authority websites with a link back to your homepage of a specific blog post.

That means you want to create guest blog posts for big players in your niche where you make a 2000-word+ blog post for them. A link from a trustworthy, content-relevant website is much more valuable than a random link from a new blog.

So, guest posting works, but it’s no longer a lazy man strategy. You’ll need to put tremendous effort into finding, negotiating, and creating high-quality content for other websites.

Blogging about your personal life and thoughts

The old idea behind this was to make your blog more personable to help readers connect with you to help grow your blog.

You can and should leverage personal experiences and stories into your blog post when possible, but it should be done in a tactful way where it enhances the content.

People need to know why you have the authority to give advice.

However, publishing personal updates does not help grow your traffic and may hurt your blog as it’s too off-topic for what Google and other search engines think you website is about.

Honestly, this type of writing you should do over on X and then link to your email list or website.

Blogging Advice That Works

Instead of blogging about your personal thoughts and opinions (which most likely no one will read). You need to instead focus on keyword research and create content people are actually looking for.

Next, depending on how competitive your topic is will determine if you need to promote your website by getting links from other websites. Link building is always important but it is critical when you are entering a well established market.

In addition, you’ll want to focus well on internal links and getting external links pointing back to specific blog posts on your website. Let’s jump into some blogging advice for 2022 that actually works.

• Quality and quantity
• Focus on the 80/20 rule for publishing
• Go where your audience is
• Don’t pay attention to search volume
• Build a brand with authority
• Email marketing

Quality and quantify

Only expect to build a high-traffic website with content. Too many get excited about starting a website, publishing 11 blog posts, and then abandoning their project for one reason or another. You need quantity when starting, so do that or don’t even start a blog.

When starting a blog, you first need to get to at least 25 to 30 blog posts to get any traffic. At this point, you’ll be indexed and considered a resource on a topic.

From there, you’ll want to work to get to around 100 blog posts, which should earn you 100-1000 visitors a day depending if you are creating searchable content. More than that, it depends on your niche and ability to keyword research topics.

One hundred good blog posts are time-consuming if you do it yourself and expensive if you’re hiring writers. But if you’re going to blog, know that if you do it, do it right.

In the long term, you’ll want to get over 250 posts. To do that, you’ll typically need to focus on the writing by putting in the hours or instead hire writers and curate content yourself as the business owner.

Focus on the 80/20 Rule for Publishing

The 80/20 rule for publishing means that 80% of the content you put out goes after content ideas you know people are looking for.

The other 20% is for you to round out your website with the required content for your topic. Sometimes, that means creating content that is on an overly competitive keyword or a keyword phrase that is not too popular, but your website would not be complete with it.

For example, I have a detailed blog post on how to create a website. That topic is incredibly competitive, and my blog post will likely never rank, but this blog would only be complete with it.

Go where you audience is

Your audience will determine where you spend the most time. Some topics it does makes more sense to focus on other platforms either as the primary traffic source or the secondary source.

I’m a video first creator, the YouTube channel comes first, this blog second. But that’s just me.

Others it may be using X and Linked In to drive traffic to a newsletter; or perhaps it’s using Pinterest and/or Facebook to run paid ads to your blog posts.

Again, know your topic and go where your audience is.

In short, I strongly suggest creating SEO optimized blog content. You need a website no doubt. However with AI disrupting Google’s dominance, you can’t rely on just blogging naymore.

So don’t overwhelm yourself but know that you will have to create content across multiple platforms where your audience is.

Don’t pay attention too much to search volume

You need to create content that people are looking for, but don’t focus too much on search volume so much.

As long as people are looking for a specific topic, your piece of content on that topic has the potential to rank for that phrases as well as similar phrases.

Google is sophisticated about indexing and ranking content and driving traffic for multiple search phrases to one piece of content. SEO’s in the past would make a distinction between phrases like “create a website” and “make a website” when in reality the search intent is the same.

Google knows this so you don’t need to stress about search volume per keyword. Just create a quality, best in class piece of content that goes after the main keyword and incorporates and related keywords in it and that content will get traffic for multiple keywords.

Build a brand with authority

Google and other search engines love brands and will rank brands that build trust and authority on a given topic over time. Brands are valuable because over time they will rank well for competitive, valuable keyword topics without much effort.

By creating a brand your goal is to be the authority on a given topic. Instead of creating a website on the best “tea kettles” go after the broader and more useful topic of brewing tea. Brands can take a year or more to build, but it becomes a valuable digital asset long term.

Email marketing is how you turn a blog into a business

Email marketing should be on your radar as an online business owner after you prove your idea will work. In general, for most bloggers, I recommend focusing on growing your blog to around 300 visitors a day at a minimum before investing in an email list provider.

When you do start email marketing, make sure to have a proper funnel setup for lead generation. That means you have a compelling reason to subscribe to your email, you take your visitors to a dedicated “thank you” page, and you have some onboarding series of emails set up.

Last, you have some sort of purpose or strategy for starting email marketing. You know what products, services, and content you want to promote. Don’t go in blind; build out a roadmap for what your goal is with your email list.

Google also has a “big publisher” problem

Sean Kaye has an excellent break down of the existential problem Google has:

The TLDR is that Google ranks brands over experts unfairly.

The complications here are twofold:

1) These sites are often not experts, authorities, or trusted advisors on these topics but will generally outrank sites that fulfil all of these requirements.

2) This runs afoul of Google’s position that you should create content for “users” and not search engines.

Sean Kaye

Big brands have professional writers, lot’s of authority due to them existing for decades and rank for competitive keywords that perhaps they should not. Like the New York times ranks for the keyword “best vlogging cameras.”

They recommend the Blue Yetti as a microphone for your iPhone vlogging setup:

This is honestly silly advice.

People who vlog are looking for a mobile, on-the-go setup.

The Blue Yeti is a big (emphasis on big) USB microphone. While it does provides decent audio, there are better options. Also, what if you’re wanting to travel vlog and record from your car or on the go? An oversized USB mic is again a silly choice.

Don’t write for search engines?!

So experts like myself who run websites, create content for these competitive keywords yet are told by Google that we should create content for users first, and not search engines. But that’s exactly what I’m doing with my vlogging camera article as I actually vlog.

Finally, Google has stated that unhelpful content could penalize an entire website, even if all the other content is helpful. So, if I write a personal blog post that is aimed at users first but is not helpful runs the risk of hurting traffic levels?

Make it make sense.

Give your hot takes on X

The reality is that your website is where you need to create helpful content that people are looking for around a topic you know and understand. If you want to share your personal takes and opinions on topics then X (formerly Twitter) is the best place to do that.

In addition, having a presence on X and other social platforms helps your website’s authority because you’re proving to the algorithms that you’re a real person with experience and a following instead of being some lazy person creating bulk content on a topic they know very little about with no e-e-a-t over the subject.

Is Blogging Dead?

Blogging is not dead if your intention is to use a blog and website as a form of content marketing to drive leads, sales, affiliate commissions and subscribers by being helpful and useful to your audience.

If you’re wanting though to focus more on writing, then I would use some combination of X and YouTube and drive traffic to a Substack website where you can offer paid subscriptions and can email your articles to your audience.

If you want to start a blog that makes money, that model still works, but not to the same degree as it used to as there are simply more creative ways people consume and share content.

But a great blog with excellent content that’s optimized around a topic people are wanting to know more about is still a very valuable asset and quite lucrative. It’s why I still run and maintain my own website and blog.