Is blogging dead, now that we have Substack?

Last week, I was invited to a Substack talk about launching a podcast on Substack. I went along (online), listened to what they had to say, decided there was no way I’m doing a podcast as I’m too busy and then promptly launched a podcast the next day.

I’ve launched it over on The Creative Way Collective, because it’s going to be all about how to be a writer, online. The episodes are currently free for everyone to listen to. And when I say episodes, I mean episode because so far, there’s only one.

In it, I spoke about how my online writing career started with blogging.

For a long time, I was embarrassed about this, it didn’t feel ‘proper’ but now I feel proud of my blogging. It takes guts to self-publish. To decide that your writing deserves to published, online, even if you’ve been rejected by traditional publications.

Many of the women who were blogging alongside me, about 10 years ago, writing about motherhood, went on to become hugely successful writers.

Katie Kirby went on to write the incredibly popular Lottie Brooks series, Sarah Turner (aka The Unmumsy Mum) is a 4x Sunday Times bestseller for her novels. There are many more examples like this. And it all started with blogging.

That’s one side of blogging. Writing online and growing a community of readers, often on social media. And the other is using blogging for your business by drawing people from Google to your website (blog) using SEO (search engine optimisation).

Back when I launched my first digital platform, in 2015, SEO was a big deal.

I wanted to attract parents of young children to my website, so I’d create articles with headers like ‘How to get my baby to sleep through the night’ and standfirst copy with key words that Google would pick up. Then, my website would move up the ranks.

I obsessed over it. And I got the traffic. But I never properly monetised it.

When I launched my online courses website, I really started seeing the benefits of SEO. I’d launch a course called ‘How to launch an online course’ and soon, anyone who typed that into Google would come across my course. Some would sign up.

But now, what with Google AI dominating that top section of Google searches rather than our websites, and with the rise of Substack as a kind of ‘blogging platform’ - do we still need blogs on our website to build community and/or drive traffic and sales?

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