Is Blogging Dead in 2020? (Hint: it isn’t)

Is blogging dead in 2020? That’s what I’ve been wondering to myself for a while. I started this blog in 2015 which, looking back was probably the end of a ‘golden age’ of blogging when barriers to entry were small but overall supply of blogs was low.

Fast forward a couple of years after that and everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) had a blog. Friends, relatives, politicians, pets – every single person on the planet seemed to be typing banal nonsense into their laptops at any opportunity.

My Motivation For Starting a Blog

I started a blog for one thing: money. I didn’t know how I was going to do it but I was going to write to get paid. Aaaand it didn’t quite work out like that. My aspirations of a steady second income were misguided at least (I should have started at few niche sites if I’d wanted to do that.)

But I did also want to write. I’ve always loved the written word and have written thousands and thousands of words that no one will ever read – luckily for them.

And so I wrote. And wrote and wrote. Much of my writing is on this blog, in my books and a few guest posts here and there.

And people like you started reading, and subscribing and reading some more. Which made me write more and so you see the writer circle of life is now in motion.

But part of the way though last year I started to wonder: is blogging dead? Is it? Or could this be the start of something better – a renaissance for online writing?

Is Blogging Dead? How to Save Blogging in 2020

The inspiration for this post was reading this post by long time online acquaintance and expert copywriter Jamie McSloy (follow on Twitter @JamieMcSloy).

In it, he says this:

Blogging is good for [recording your life story], even if it isn’t good for SEO anymore. The network effects of experimenting and recording are huge. People will read, people will contribute, and it all adds up to the fact that you can make a big challenge into a chapter in your self-creating memoirs.

The more I thought about it, the more I know he’s right. So what if blogging doesn’t make you a millionaire like Tim Ferris or James Altucher. And who cares if only a few hundred people ever read what you write? Were you really going to ditch your day job to become a ‘blogger’ anyway?

Instagram, TikTok and other visual platforms are full of ‘influencers’ who have thousands of followers and push out picture after video clip after ‘Story’.

But what they really give you is the content equivalent of cocaine. Beautiful and exciting at the time over after a few minutes its over, leaving you empty wanting the next hit.

Which is why blogging like this cannot die. Because as long as there are people like me (and Jamie) and countless others to write, to examine and to share their stories, long form online writing will continue.

Reading a blog post takes commitment – time to sit for a few minutes and take in the words, the meaning, the flow of the writer and his message. In a world of high speed this or instant EVERYTHING, that time is golden.

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