Is Blogging Still Worth Doing In 2020?

When I first got started online, back in the mists of 1998, blogging had not even been invented.

But by dint of archiving my text-only newsletter (ezine) on my simple little 5-page HTML website, and linking to the Archive Page via my top navigation menu, I began to attract an awful lot of search engine traffic.

Nobody had heard of Seth Godin yet. Thomas Leonard, father of the Coaching Movement, was mad on blogging and encouraged everyone to do it. Ditto my coach, Christ Barrow and he’s still at it.

This was blogging before blogging software – or WordPress – had even been invented.

A few years ago, my podcast partner Judith Morgan did a blogging challenge where she blogged every day for a year. She paid a search engine optimisation specialist client of hers to tweak her blog for maximum effect and it worked, she got to Page One of Google for ‘business coach London’ and attracted clients. I can’t remember why she stopped now, apart from the brutal schedule she’d set herself.

Over the years I’ve blogged intensively, blogged sporadically, and blogged not at all. In 2019 I let my podcast episodes and any videos I created be the blog posts, as they could be automated and I had pretty much decided that blogging is dead.

And yet, and yet….

Many businesses still maintain a blog and blogging stalwarts like Chris Barrow carry on, with posts of varying length. I just checked on Seth Godin and he’s still blogging too, albeit some very short posts, mixed in with the longer ones.

I’ve reached out to Chris and to Guy Levine, who was our digital marketing guru at the time and who now runs highly successful digital marketing agency Return.co, in Manchester, to ask if blogging is still effective.

Meanwhile, I’m going to experiment with a blog post a day, to loosen me up and get me into the mood for screenwriting and finishing my timeslip/sci-fi novel.

It can’t hurt and I’ll report back soon on the results. My traffic is pretty static right now so any boost will soon show.

I’ve got a bit of a mission on too.

I want to knock a blog post that attracts large numbers of the wrong kind of traffic, off the top slot in my Analytics > Content > All Pages slot.

Let’s see what I can do, blogging in 2020.