Is blogging worth it? That doesn’t seem like a bad question to ask at the beginning of the year, don’t you think?

And it’s even more important to ponder on this question when we have a best-selling author like Kristine Kathryn Rusch calling it quits on blogging.

As someone who has been blogging consistently for quite some time, hearing about the news sure does break me into a nervous sweat.

It gets me to question myself if I should do the same too.

If there’s one person you should heed the advice about the publishing industry, it’s certainly Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

She has been in the publishing industry for a long time, with tons of books in many different genres under her belt.

And let’s not forget her insight into the publishing industry.

When she says that she quits blogging, it sure does cause a stir, sort of, in the author community.

What Kristine Kathryn Rusch said about her decision to quit blogging

Depending on where you caught wind of the news, you probably heard this snippet where she was comparing the time she spent on writing a book and a blog post from a financial perspective.

If spending the time to write a book will net her $1000 per hour as opposed to writing a blog post that will only bring her $30 per hour, then it makes sense to spend the time on publishing a book.

That sure is a legitimate reason to quit blogging, if you ask me.

As much as it pains me to admit it, she’s right.

Blogging doesn’t yield you a lot of money even if you have all kinds of monetization in place.

But here’s the thing that most people get wrong about her decision to quit blogging.

When she says that she quits blogging, she doesn’t mean that she will abandon her blog and let it rot among the other blogs in the Internet ether.

What she actually means is that she quit writing about the publishing industry on her blog.

That’s the only thing she stopped writing, not the usual blogging she does on her blog.

Take a look at her blog and you’ll notice that her blog is always active like it usually does.

Yes, people. It pays to read the blog post in its entirety, not just take the snippet as a gospel.

If you only hear a snippet of the blog, you seriously believe that she abandoned the blogging ship altogether which she doesn’t.

Is blogging worth it, then?

Whether is blogging worth it or not will depend on what you want the blog to do for you.

Do you want the blog to generate more direct sales for you and find new readers like clockwork?

Or perhaps you want to use your blog to connect with your readers?

Maybe you also want the blog to generate additional income for you in the form of affiliates, sponsorship, and display ads such as Google AdSense.

Regardless of what you want the blog to achieve, your blog needs to have a specific goal in mind.

You’re only wasting your time if you’re unclear about what the blog needs to achieve for you.

How to make blogging a worthwhile pursuit

Let’s be honest here. Blogging can take as much as precious time away from publishing your book even if you’re in the zone and writer’s block never exists in your dictionary.

So, what can you do to make blogging a worthwhile pursuit especially after you lose your motivation to keep going?

Well, these are the things that you can do to make blogging a worthwhile pursuit that can also bring you the result you want.

Do a proper optimization for your blog and website

Sure, you can post a link to your blog post on social media in the hope that the topic is interesting enough to catch your target readers’ attention.

But the problem with social media is that the algorithm won’t work in your favor if your posts have links in them.

Honestly, I knew how messed up the social media algorithm was. But the fact the algorithm won’t give love to these posts never occurred to me until I heard about it in this episode from the Learning with Leslie podcast.

With social media which is no longer giving you its blessing to you like it used to, what can you do to bring your target audience to your door?

Well, you will have to optimize your blog and website for the search engine, of course.

Yes, you will still be subjecting yourself to search engine algorithms.

But unlike social media algorithms, it can still send traffic your way as long as you optimize the page with relevant keywords without subjecting yourself to grey and black hat SEO techniques.

Optimizing your blog and website for the search engine isn’t that hard to do either. You can take a look at this free SEO course from Neil Patel right here if you want to learn more about doing SEO the right way.

Write about topics that intersect with what you enjoy and your readers’ interest

If there’s one thing that can stop your blogging effort dead on track is this – you no longer find the joy in the topic you write.

Well, it’s hard to be consistent with blogging when you’re falling out of love with the topics you write about.

So, what you should do to rekindle your passion for blogging once again?

Sad to say, the only thing you can do is to sit down and brainstorm any topic you find interesting and it intersects with your readers’ interest as well.

You can take as long as you want to brainstorm the topic that you can see yourself writing in the long run.

But once you nail it down, you need to be consistent with it.

That’s the only way for the blog to yield the outcome you want.

Don’t be shy to do hard selling on your blog

Yes, we all want our blogs to do the selling for us. But how do you expect the blog to do the selling for you when you don’t even have a brief mention of your book within the blog post itself?

Do you expect your target readers to discover that you’re an author with a stroke of luck?

Of course, the answer is no, right?

Whether you like it or not, you need to mention your book in the blog post even if it feels icky to you.

The good news is you don’t have to go all out when it comes to getting your target readers to notice your book.

A brief mention of the book with an eye-catching graphic should do the trick.

While I don’t have an eye-catching graphic in my blog post yet, I do mention my book at the end of each blog post.

Will it be enough to get people to buy my books directly from me is something that I’m not sure of.

But I do intend to play around with it just to see if it can help with generating direct sales for me.

So stay tuned for my future blog post about my experiment with adding a graphic to my brief web copy to generate direct sales.

Blogging isn’t going away

For many of us, hearing Kristine Kathryn Rusch say that she stopped blogging altogether got us to believe that blogging isn’t worth our time pursuing.

But guess what?

Anything in life can be a worthless pursuit if you don’t have clarity on what the result should be.

The reason why blogging takes the most jab is simply because it’s not trendy anymore and anything untrendy should face its demise.

Like it or not, anything in written form is here to stay, blogging included.

As someone who has been blogging for a long time, is blogging worth it at the end of the day?

Of course, the answer is yes. And I believe it’s here to stay for quite some time too as long as the written forms of any kind cease to exist.