Is there a downside to blogging?
Yes, blogging is time-consuming because you need to spend time doing research, writing, editing, adding videos, promoting, and so on. Also, driving traffic to your blog is challenging.
Unfortunately, these are the most important aspects of blogging if you want to get your digital marketing strategies right. But, if you are an entrepreneur running a small business, this may be a bit overwhelming.
I will discuss the 2 downsides of blogging that entrepreneurs face and highlight some brands that have undergone these challenges.
Let’s dive in!
#Downside 1: blogging is time-consuming
How many small businesses have time or a budget for blogging? There is a lot that goes around to starting a blog.
For instance, you need to write high-quality content, which requires research, editing, proofreading, etc.
Let’s take an example with editing. For your blog to read right, you must use editing tools. These tools will help you edit your blog and make it readable.
But do you know these tools are not free to use? You must buy a subscription to access them because the free ones have limitations.
So if you are running a business within a budget, this will be a challenge.
Also, you may be blogging on topics you don’t understand, and for a blog to stay relevant, you should post regularly. Which means you have to hire a writer to write for you. At times you may get a good writer and vice versa.
If you fall in the hands of an inexperienced writer, then your blog will have low-quality content. That will force Google to take down your blog.
#Downside 2: it is hard to drive traffic
If you want your blog to stay relevant and get revenues, you need to keep driving traffic. However, this is not easy for many businesses.
There are two essential ways of driving traffic:
- Organically where people find your blog after searching through Google, Bing, or Yahoo. This requires you to use SEO and other forms of keyword search.
- Paid ads, and I am going to discuss this below.
Paid ads
These are fantastic if you need to drive traffic to your blog and get some profits fast. But the truth is you have to invest some bucks. Some businesses succeed in this once they put in time and patience.
But for small businesses, most of the time, they lose patience and end up deserting the whole process because it is expensive.
Others prefer to take shortcuts that make Google penalize their blogs. They buy or ask for links to drive traffic to their blogs in exchange for a favor.
I will highlight some brands that have used links to drive traffic to their businesses to show you how dangerous it is to buy links.
Rap Genius, a digital media company, asked bloggers to add links to its lyrics back in 2013. In return, they promised to retweet the posts from those bloggers. Google investigated and penalized the company by removing it from the first page.
Another brand is Overstock which created a program where they provided discounts to products in exchange for links. They had a specific anchor text to URLs from edu sites. When Google found out they were removed and were no longer ranking high.
This occurs to many businesses, and they end up losing their blogs. But if done right, you can reap the benefits of paid ads which include;
- Exposure of your business to a larger audience, thus bringing in more traffic and revenues.
- Track and measure results are made possible, so it is easy to get your ROI.
We also have different types of paid ads, namely;
- PPC — (pay per click) refers to the amount of money you pay if somebody clicks your ad.
- PPI — (pay per impression) refers to the amount of money you pay for displaying your post at least 100 times.
Unfortunately, many businesses, especially small entrepreneurs, find it hard to follow these procedures to make their blogging successful.
Wrapping Up
There are many downsides to blogging, but the main ones are;
- Time-consuming
- Hard to drive traffic
You can add some more, and let’s keep the discussion going.
