I have been blogging for 10 years. Despite being in this industry for a decade, I have mixed feelings about it. Below, I have discussed the reasons why I feel that creating a text content website is a waste of time and money. If you’re someone who wants to start a blog thinking that it is a very lucrative career and highly rewarding or if you’re in this business or pursuing this hobby, this article is for you
Reasons why blogging is a waste of money and time
You have to write a lot
Blogging is all about publishing content. You have to write and publish content by yourself unless you have deep pockets and can hire someone to do this task for you. Your content should be free from grammatical issues and should not be taken from elsewhere on the web if you want it to be accessible to search engine users. It can take hours or even days to write an appealing article. Although you can write content anywhere i.e. from home, farm, terrace, etc, you’ll have to spend a great deal of time writing.
No guarantee of traffic
You can publish as many articles as you want on your blog. There’s no guarantee that search engines will rank your pages in search results. If you look at the search results of a random keyword, you will find only leading websites of their niches in search results. For example, if you search for a programming-related query, the results page will boast content published on stackoverflow.com.
Likewise, only portals such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Times of India, etc rank for political news. A new website cannot compete with the likes of such large sites. Even if you publish a lot of posts, the blog will get only a few visitors for a few years or months until Google finds it trustworthy, and high-quality and starts ranking all of your blog’s pages in their result pages.
Google algorithm updates
In the last 10 years, Google has made major changes to its algorithm. They have also changed their webmaster guidelines on several occasions. After a major algorithm update, the webmaster forum is flooded with dozens of messages from people whose websites have been impacted severely by the update. The algorithm has become severe. Let’s consider the example of the Google Spam algorithm update which was unleashed in October 2022. Within a week of this update being rolled out, the traffic of hundreds of sites had plummeted by 80 to 90%. Imagine the feelings of a person who worked on a blog for an entire year, spent hundreds of dollars on the website and his/her portal’s traffic was suddenly down by 90% overnight.
Search engines such as Google and Bing update their algorithm several times a year. Unfortunately, they don’t share reasons why a website’s traffic is negatively affected after an update.
It’s rare that good sites are negatively affected by search engines update but some things are out of your control. For example, if a competitor creates hundreds of harmful backlinks to your website and you don’t notice this, your blog’s traffic may tank after a backlink-related algorithm update. Google Search Console is a great tool but it doesn’t have a detailed backlink report. If you compare the data of the Console with that provided by leading SEO tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc you’ll stop referring to the backlink report of GSC.
Waste of money
Hosting fees: Free blogging platforms have basic features and to use their alternatives i.e. self-hosted CMS software such as WordPress, you’ll have to buy hosting. The entry-level plans of web hosting companies can cost 3 to 10 dollars per month. If you purchase managed hosting plan, you will have to pay 20 to 30 dollars per month.
Domains: If you want your website to be accessible with a domain of your choice instead of a subdomain, you must purchase a .com, .net, or .org domain and point the same to your host by changing the nameservers. Although domains are cheap, their cost is still an expenditure for maintaining a blog.
So these are some of the reasons why I think blogging is a waste of time and money.
