I Quit My Blogs and Replaced Them with Three Simple, Free, Writing Platforms

I feel lighter already

My word of the year for 2024 is ‘simplify.’ And I have to say, I’m smashing it. Things in my business and personal life are getting simpler by the day, and it feels amazing.

So today I’m sharing with you how the simplification process is panning out, in terms of my content creation business. Just in case you’re on a similar journey, and you’re interested in the mechanics.

This week I quit all three of my niche blogs and stepped away from blogging, around 16 years after I first felt the thrill of hitting publish and sending my very first blog post out into the world. To start with, let’s look at the main reasons why.

I can’t compete

As Brendan Charles pointed out in this article, big corporations are spending more on SEO than many of us do on our mortgage. As a writer for a content marketing agency who provides SEO content for corporations, I know just how true this is. So how do I compete, SEO wise, with my little niche blogs? I can’t.

So what’s the alternative? If I can’t bring in organic search traffic, I have to get traffic from somewhere else. I could use paid ads, but again, I’m competing with organisations whose budget is about the same value as my entire house.

Or, of course, I can build a community of readers.

Now don’t get me wrong. Building a community can be fun. Interacting on social media. Commenting on other people’s blogs. Networking with those in my niche. Building an email list.

I’ve done all that, and it’s ridiculously time consuming. Especially when you’re blogging on Wordpress and there’s no natural, built-in community. You can end up spending more time networking than creating content. And ultimately I’m a creator, not a networker.

Google doesn’t love bloggers anymore

At least not bloggers like me (those of us who run niche sites that predominantly work on affiliate sales). I’ve been affiliate marketing for a long time. I’m a fan. But as Paulo A. José highlights in this article, Google no longer loves affiliate sites, and it certainly doesn’t prioritise them in the SERPs.

Google’s Helpful Content Update aims to reward content that visitors find satisfying. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all bloggers who make money via affiliate sales are doomed, but it does have an impact.

It means we will have to work harder and harder to do two related but separate things:

Produce that insanely high quality content
Drive enough traffic to it so that the Google algorithms can pick up on the fact that visitors are finding it useful

To sum up, nothing is getting easier for the typical, small-scale, niche blogger.

I started hating my backend

Blogging isn’t just about writing. It’s about domain names, and design, and themes, and plug-ins, and analytics, and comment moderation, and answering email and contact form messages. A lot of email and contact form messages, and a lot of comments: mostly spam. Notifications I’m immensely happy not to see in my inbox anymore include “New Contact Form Entry” and “Please Moderate”.

A ridiculous amount of my comments and contact form messages were either spam or people pitching me stuff they were trying to sell. Often stuff that was unnecessary and inappropriate for my business. (Hint: if someone has a blog about solopreneurship they likely don’t need a complex piece of software to help them manage their payroll.)

I feel 50 pounds lighter, metaphorically speaking, for not having to deal with it. Plus all my email now comes to one main inbox and is much easier to deal with.

In related news, narrowing my focus has allowed me to do a digital declutter and unsubscribe from everything that’s just not serving me right now. My inbox is more manageable and my brain is less overwhelmed. And my list of essential daily, weekly and monthly tasks is highly simplified.

I started neglecting my backend

As outlined above, there’s an awful lot of stuff that you need to be doing to maintain your blog. If you don’t do it, no-one cares, initially. Nothing happens. But neglecting your backend is unhealthy, long term. Over time, and can in fact damage the health of your whole site, allowing it to become susceptible to cyberattacks, viruses, malware and worse.

So added to the stress of having to do the work is the guilt (and therefore added stress) of knowing you haven’t done the work, and there could be consequences.

And boy, does that become a downward spiral because your blog dashboard is like a room in your house. It’s easy for the mess to mount up, and the messier it is, the less you want to go in and start sorting it out. Walking away from those messy, neglected dashboards feels a little like burning down a specific room I never want to go in again.

It was costing me money

It costs money to run a blog, even if you bootstrap it and use a ton of free tools. You have to pay for hosting, domain names and newsletter software, at the very least.

Add to that premium themes and plugins, paid stock photo sites and all the other little bits of software you feel you need to run a successful blog, and it all adds up.

My blogs weren’t actually losing money. I’ve always made enough in affiliate sales to make a profit. But due to those Google updates outlined above, that could have changed any time. And the profit wasn’t enough to justify the hours spent on them.

Over time, I started to resent paying out for that hosting, those domain renewals, that newsletter software, especially on months that I wasn’t giving my blogs much attention and therefore was making very little revenue from them.

As an aside, I remember feeling happy when I set my main blog to not auto-renew, thinking “in a few months’ time when that renewal comes due I won’t have to pay that $19.95”. Then I put the domain name up for sale through Afternic. A couple of days later my domain name sold. I mean, it only sold for around $120 (it wasn’t even a .com) but still. It was perhaps the easiest $120 I’d made from blogging, ever.

I Replaced My Blogs with These Three, Simple Free Online Platforms

I replaced my blogs with three free, simple-to-use, platforms. I’m still able to make money and build a community. It just takes less time and is more enjoyable to do. Here’s where I’ll be focusing the effort I used to channel into blogging.

Medium

Before anyone points out that Medium isn’t free, because you now have to be a paid member in order to earn from the partner program, I should perhaps explain how I look at it. My Medium subscription is something I pay as a reader and always have. I pay to read (and I read a lot). The fact that I’m also able to paywall my stories because of that is a bonus.

I’ve been writing on Medium since 2018. I have good months and bad months on the platform. Articles that earn four figures and articles that earn next to nothing. Articles that get boosted (like this one and this), and others that I put a lot of time into and really think might get boosted but don’t (like this one).

However, I love writing on Medium, have over 20,000 followers, and have had overall positive experiences. I think I’ve worked out how to give myself the best chance of earning money on the platform, and I have a built-in community of followers, subscribers and people who regularly read my stuff.

I can still share affiliate products on Medium, and potentially make a little money from that, plus there’s the partner program, which brings in a welcome extra wedge of income, even on my not-so-good months.

Substack

I’m new to Substack and still finding my feet over there. I looked into it when it hit me that I couldn’t continue to easily run my newsletters without my blogs. I wasn’t worried about that. Far from it. It’s a relief not to be having to juggle three different newsletters, pay for an email provider, and stress about A/B testing and auto resends and open rates.

But I did want to continue to have some kind of newsletter. Some way to reach into the inboxes of my readers and continue to build my little community of like-minded writers.

So I’ve started a new, free, newsletter over on Substack. It’s aimed at writers, has quite a narrow focus and will require a me to write a short, focused snippet of writing advice each week.

I also aim to make it a curated newsletter, which will effectively allow me to compile all my favourite writing advice each week (something I do naturally as I read articles I love) and share them, all in one place.

Some of the things that appeal about Substack:

My writing over there is available online as a freely-available, shareable post, but is also sent out to subscribers (similar to Medium)
There seems to be a welcoming, generous and active writing community over there
I don’t need a website or blog in order to use the platform
I can still include affiliate links and make money that way
I can transition from a free newsletter to a paid one in the future if that makes sense for me
There are no upfront costs (Substack makes money by taking a commission on paid newsletters — offer a free one and there’s no fee)

As I say, I’m still finding my way over there. I’ll be writing an update here on Medium at the end of my first month there, so follow me if you’re interested in that. Or you can of course just subscribe to my Substack and see how my first month pans out first-hand.

Gumroad

Gumroad is my platform of choice for my digital products and has been for a while. Like Substack, there are no up-front costs. Gumroad takes a commission when you sell something via their platform.

I’m not gonna lie. There are a lot of limitations to the platform. But remember, for me, at this point, it’s all about simplifying. Gumroad might lack some of the bells and whistles of bigger, more expensive, more complicated platforms, but it works for me.

I use Gumroad to sell my success kits, my planners and my journals. I use it to provide freebies my audience might like (and might even pay for — Gumroad allows you to add a pay-what-you-want option so people can name their own price).

I even use Gumroad for email marketing, in terms of my digital products. The platform captures the email of everyone who buys from you and gives you the option to contact them direct, if for example you launch a new product or have something on sale.

So that’s it. My new, highly simplified, three-platform system.

I know what’s coming. All the bloggers out there will be pointing out that I don’t own these platforms, and therefore I don’t own my audience on them. Any of them could disappear overnight, or ban my account.

They’re right, of course. But here’s the thing. I’ve been hearing that since I started my first blog online in 2008. That’s 16 years ago. 16 years of being in this online space and creating content. I’ve survived so many changes already, and re-invented myself so many times.

And I’m not alone. Some of the people I follow online are the same people I was following back in 2008. Everything has changed since then, including us. Very few of us are running the same blogs, websites, lists and businesses. Some of us have changed our niches, business models and areas of focus more than once. Many of us seem to be doing it again right now.

Ultimately things are going to change. Over and over. Learning to adapt, let go of things, and reinvent yourself is okay. And I’m ready for the next era. Follow me, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Like this article? Take a look at my lists. There’s one all about writing and blogging.