Expand Summary
The article advises against starting a blog due to the long-term commitment, high costs, difficulty in finding quality authors, complex analytics, and the fact that many businesses do not benefit from systematic content marketing.
Abstract
The author, an expert in copywriting and content marketing, discourages readers from starting a blog, emphasizing the significant time investment and delayed results, often taking six months to a year before seeing any substantial SEO traffic. The financial commitment is also highlighted, with an estimated $14,000 annually for a basic blog with regular content. The challenge of finding skilled authors who can produce quality content is underscored, along with the complexity of measuring the return on investment from blog traffic. The article suggests that for many businesses, such as local enterprises or those with straightforward services, a blog may not be necessary or effective. Instead, the author recommends alternative strategies like promotional pages on Pinterest, publishing in established media, influencer advertising, and independent social media channels as more immediate and potentially profitable approaches.
Opinions
- Blogging is portrayed as a long-term commitment with no guarantee of success, particularly in attracting SEO traffic.
- The cost of maintaining a quality blog is considered significant, with expenses including design, SEO optimization, article writing, and editorial oversight.
- Finding competent authors who can produce expert-level content is seen as a major hurdle, with the process often yielding few suitable candidates.
- The article suggests that complex analysis is required to truly understand the effectiveness of a blog, which may be beyond the capabilities or budget of many companies.
- The author opines that many businesses, such as local services or those with clear, off-the-shelf products, may not benefit from content marketing and would be better served by other marketing strategies.
- A blog is often not enough on its own to convert traffic into customers; it may need to be part of a larger marketing funnel involving email newsletters or social media engagement.
- The author posits that alternative platforms like Pinterest, media publications, blogger collaborations, and social networks can provide quicker results and may be more suitable for content marketing efforts.
- Starting a blog is recommended only if a business has exhausted performance marketing channels, is prepared for a long-term investment without immediate results, and can afford to potentially lose a substantial marketing budget on an unproven hypothesis.
Making your own blog, writing useful articles on it, warming up your readers, and getting them to rush to you with money sounds like a cool idea. But in most cases, it’s only cool on paper.
My colleagues and I create copywriting, provide content marketing for companies, and, among other things, maintain blogs for companies.
Interestingly, in this article, I’m going to dissuade you from starting a blog.
In this article, I call a blog a section of a website or a separate website made specifically for publishing articles. I won’t discuss Telegram channels, or VC profiles in this article. Only articles on the company website.
Reason 1: A blog is a lifelong job with no guarantee of results.
Attracting traffic from search engines is the main benefit that blogs provide to the person who owns them.
Telegram, Instagram, promotional pages, and even articles in the media don’t know how to consistently attract shareware users, and, what’s more, they don’t know how to increase search engine confidence on the other pages of the site.
But the problem is that this effect is not achieved immediately.
You start a blog, write articles, and do SEO for it, but search engines ignore them for the first six months.
If your domain doesn’t have a strong reputation, it will take even longer. It’s not uncommon for an increase in search traffic to begin just a year after you start publishing articles regularly.
For example, take a look at the search traffic statistics for one of our articles. We published it in September 2021, and until July 2022, we received less than 100 views per month. It took almost a year before the increase in traffic started.
But you may not get SEO traffic to your blog. Or wait, but not in the quantity you expect.
Or there will be traffic, but not targeted, and with an insignificant number of conversions. The problem is that you’ll find this out after at least six months of blind testing of a very expensive hypothesis. This is a very long feedback loop.
Reason 2: Blogging is expensive
Let’s estimate on our knees how much it will cost to run a very ordinary blog for 1 year, where you publish 6 articles a month, optimized for search traffic.
That’s $14,000 a year. What’s more, this is the most economical version of the blog:
- for $700 for the design and configuration of the blog, you get the most basic site, with no frills or niceties
- An SEO specialist, in a good sense, should not only make technical specifications but also check and optimize articles
- to get more results faster, 6 articles won’t be enough –
- $300 per article is an option without beautiful graphics and plates, collages, and especially hand-drawn illustrations
The blog, in a good sense, needs an editor — a person who will select the authors of the articles, give them technical specifications, and monitor the quality of the texts. That’s at least another $700 a month, otherwise, the head of the company or a marketing professional will have to do the job.
Most importantly: to write good articles, you need experts to interview the authors and check the facts of the articles. Usually, company employees become experts: they interview the authors and then check the facts in the resulting text.
Preparation, the interview itself, and checking take around 3 hours per article, or 216 hours per year for a blog with 6 articles per month. Calculate for yourself how much money this means for your company.
Reason 3: Finding good authors is a search that ends nowhere
Perhaps someone was surprised by the price of $300 per article in the last section.
But that really is the minimum wage if you want to publish not just a few texts, but high-quality articles.
We need authors who understand the topic well, prepare for a conversation with an expert conduct interviews, and then turn the story into a structured and logical text. And also incorporate SEO keys in there.
But even if you are willing to pay $300 or more for a text, it will be very difficult to find a suitable author. There will be many willing people, but not many good authors among them. Once you’ve posted a spot, be prepared to:
- read incomprehensible texts about yourself along the lines of: “I wrote great essays at school…” and “I’m going to write a delicious text to make you want to eat your business…”
- see a portfolio of frankly useless texts
- be disappointed by authors who seemed nice, but actually gave up on the first assignment or brought in a lousy text (nothing like the ones in the portfolio)
- find 1–2 good freelance writers, invest in their training, and at some point, they’ll be writing articles for some bank’s team
We regularly look for writers for new projects: we publish vacancies, receive hundreds of responses, and, on average, out of 100 candidates, only 4 to 5 make it to the test task. And only half of them actually do it.
Believe me: good authors who regularly provide quality material are worth their weight in gold.
Reason 4: Complex analysis
When you invest a lot of money in marketing, you want to objectively see the return on investment: you’ve invested $1 million, you’ve received 250 leads, the cost of a lead is $4,000.
But the blog won’t have such statistics.
Instead, there will be statistics on traffic, time on site, viewing depth, transitions to other pages on the site, and conversion to a subscription.
The articles will also contain links to purchase or submit a subscription with UTM tags — in theory, you can track lead generation using these.
But in reality, you can’t get objective data this way: for example, a person could read you on social media for three years, and then go to your blog once and buy from it — it looks like a blog lead, but it turns out it’s not.
Or vice versa: a person read your blog for three years, then went to a social network and bought — it looks like the blog did all the work and the credit goes to the social networks.
The problem is solved by end-to-end analytics — from the moment a person visits the site for the first time, it tracks which pages they’ve visited and will show whether you have a new customer on your blog or not.
It would be nice if every company with a blog had these analytics — but this is an expensive, large-scale project that few people dare to undertake.
Reason 5: Few people need systematic content marketing
All this regular posting of quality content, investment in media traffic, and warm-up doesn’t make much sense for many companies.
- There’s no need to do content marketing for local businesses — you’ll be tortured to filter out traffic that isn’t from your region.
- No need to do content marketing for businesses with clear “off-the-shelf” services — stores, car services, hairdressers, cafés, and restaurants — potential customers don’t need useful content, they need cases, reviews, clear descriptions, and photographs.
- There’s no need for content marketing if performance marketing still has potential: it’s simply simpler, has clear analytics and probably won’t be any more expensive.
- Companies whose products require a short decision-making cycle don’t need content marketing. In this case, the audience simply doesn’t need advertising warm-up, direct or native, it’s enough.
A blog may not be enough, you need a funnel
What you’ll probably find is that your blog generates SEO traffic, but this traffic doesn’t convert into customers. This is a normal situation for products whose promotion involves a lot of contact with the public.
In this case, the blog becomes the gateway to the funnel, and then you have to go deeper — they usually choose email newsletters or social networks for this. A user visits a blog, reads an interesting article, sees a subscription block, and ends up in your funnel.
But users can enter the warm-up funnel directly, without a blog-like layout. You can create a lead magnet and distribute it by subscribing to an email newsletter.
Or run a Telegram channel and buy advertising directly on it. This is at least simpler and possibly also more profitable.
Let’s do the math.
I run a Telegram channel and spent $2998 on promoting it. For that amount, I received 4,347 subscribers—$6.9 per person.
Let’s assume that the conversion from blog visitor to Telegram channel subscriber is 3%—that’s even a positive situation. In that case, we would need 144,900 blog visitors from search engines to get the same 4,347 subscribers.
It’s possible to achieve this result in two years. If all the stars align, within a year. In other words, we’ll be spending at least $638,000, compared to $299,943 on promotion through advertising.
All this with no guarantee of results: you may not get the SEO traffic you need or the conversion to subscription will fall below 3%. And you won’t find that out any time soon.
Don’t create a blog, create this instead
“Promotional pages on Pinterest”. You write 3–4 articles, generate traffic, and get conversions and leads almost immediately. Essentially, it’s like performance marketing, but instead of the usual creative, there’s an article.
Articles in the media, including here on Medium. These platforms already have an audience and great coverage; you don’t have to wait six months for them; Based on an article, you can gauge the reaction of readers and, if necessary, quickly change tactics.
Advertising with bloggers. Just like in the media, there is already a ready-made audience, and, on the plus side, you also get a recommendation from a person who subscribers consider an authority — if, of course, you choose the right blogger.
Independent social media. If you understand that you need to gather and warm up an audience, start with social networks: Telegram. If you’re ready to buy advertising from bloggers or record moments for promotion, you can turn to Instagram. It’s easier than maintaining and promoting a blog with articles.
When should you start a blog?
You should only start a blog if you realize that SEO traffic is a growth point for your marketing and you’re willing to invest in it for a long time.
That means:
Performance channels no longer allow you to scale sufficiently. You need more leads, but increasing your advertising budget increases the cost per lead too much — and pitches become unprofitable. In this case, a blog will help you reach a less warm audience, warm them up and put them on sale.
You’re comfortable with the idea of a blog as an entry point into the funnel, rather than a tool for direct lead generation. And you’re ready to invest in developing warm-up funnels for blog visitors: lead magnets, email chains, social media, webinars.
You don’t expect results here or now. You’re ready to invest in a blog for at least a year, and you’ll accept the fact that during this period, the blog only generates expenses.
If the hypothesis doesn’t work, there will be no disaster. In other words, the marketing budget allows you to allocate more than 638,000 to test a hypothesis without guaranteeing a result.
A blog is not the last straw for marketing, but an area for systematic development.