The answer isn't super clear. Blog content feels saturated now and costly to capture search mrketshare. Newsletters are crowded enough that it’s hard to stand out in. Whichever ecosystem we go with now, it feels like we’re late to the game.
Andrew Chen wrote a great post about how AI has changed the marketing game. TBD on how things shake out and which new channel dominates. He btw also abandoned his website and launched his newsletter early this summer.
Is it worth it to still invest in our blog, or should we shift focus to building content for our Substack? We’re a very new business having launched early this year. We are just starting to see some traffic. We also have like no subscribers on Substack. Our decision is from base zero — which platform will allow us to grow faster (# of viewers or readers who follow us) and subsequently monetize that audience. For the latter, this is something we are still figuring out. It could be consulting/agency, ads, or other.
The blog lives on your website domain - you own it. You have full control over the content, structure, and branding. You have acquired the traffic to it, and you can do whatever you like with that traffic — run ads, get sponsors, sell things.
SEO is “free”. It’s a lot of work to build that traffic. You need to consistently produce quality content, build authority with backlinks, and think about the other SEO best practices. But if you’re successful at building organic traffic, it will pay dividends.
There are many now.
When I started my career in the early days of online marketing, you could throw up a website, stuff a bunch of keywords onto a page, buy backlinks, and voila - you’d make bank selling leads to online universities
Nowadays, Google is quite a bit more sophisticated. There’s a long and well-documented history of the major algo updates, for example: rewarding high quality backlinks; dinging content that doesn’t comply with E.A.T.; and (in March) de-indexing low-quality, auto-generated (presumably AI) content .
It’s harder to build traffic, and equally hard to keep that traffic. Of recent, there are some notable figures who have given up their sites to create a newsletter.
Nick Lafferty started his namesake website in mid 2019 selling notion templates. Now he focuses on his Early Exit Club Newsletter, where he has been transparent about his steadily declining traffic and affiliate revenue, noting increasing search presence from social platforms Reddit, LinkedIn and Medium.
He also shared these really interesting charts on the increases in search traffic to these platforms:
I think he was one of the early guys to sell Notion templates, and I suspect there’s a lot more competition on those keywords now. A look at the keyword “notion templates”, which has 22K monthly searches, shows that his site dropped from position #2 in 2022 to position #47 today.
Google is always testing new SERP features, and website owners and marketers are often freaking out over any change for fear that it might kill their organic traffic. Right now, that change is their generative AI answers, “AI Overviews”, at the top of search results. It’s scary for publishers, because Google is basically ingesting websites’ content as training ground for their AI to power those answers. Mind you, these websites probably all have T&Cs which prohibit unauthorized use of the content and which Google is basically violating.
But we’ve seen this type of thing happen before. In 2014, Google introduced Featured Snippets which many feared would take clicks away from the sites by extracting and surfacing the answer right in the SERP. (Google has argued that the listing provides more brand exposure and can actually lead to higher clicks, but the general consensus is that websites lose traffic.) Some German companies even sued Google and won. Many companies figured out how to optimize for Featured Snippets: provide just enough info to entice the user but not give away the farm (eg showing the first few steps of a 10-step solution).
Then, in 2019, voice assistants — Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Amazon Echo — were supposed to be the next big thing. People worried these devices would bypass organic search results by reading only the result in Position 0 (Featured Snippet). But voice searches didn’t take off the way we thought they would. That may change soon with ChatGPT.
Generative-AI seems to be a more paramount shift. As soon as ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, Google issued a “code red” to shift resources toward AI development and address these competitive threats. At the Google I/O developer conference last week, the company even mentioned “AI” 120 times, as counted by their AI model Gemini.
Google was right to do so. SearchGPT's closed beta launched about a month ago.
But both Google and SearchGPT are not perfect. Hallucinations are not infrequent -- this is when generative AI serves up a bad or wrong answer:
It’s kinda comical. At least Google cites the source. A quick look at Crunchbase shows no indication that Levain raised $100B in financing. That’s just ludicrous.
Google has been the incumbent for decades. I’m sure their AI will rapidly improve, but they face the very real threat of SearchGPT.
If publishers begin to have more success growing followers and monetizing on other platforms, they will move their content to those alternatives, which will drive search volume and traffic down, leading to a growing graveyard of website archives.
As mentioned above, Nick Lafferty moved his writings from his website to his Substack, Early Exit Club, where he has over 2K subscribers. His last blog post was in November 2023. He’s now publishing his free newsletter once every 1-2 weeks. His main source of income is consulting, but he has mentioned that he hopes to grow affiliate revenue into a larger passive income stream. With his website traffic down, I wonder if he’ll instead offer a paid subscription or sponsorship spots within the newsletter.
Andrew Chen also recently announced he had moved to Substack, where he now has 213K subscribers. His website is up still, but now it’s an archive of his past essays. He stacked this note that I think sums up well why he made the move:
Andrew is an expert on growth, and it sounds like Substack’s community can do more to expand his reach than his old website could. Not that he needs to monetize his content (he’s general partner at A16Z) — I think he just loves to write, connect with people and engage in meaningful discussions. This makes Substack a great fit for him.
I personally love how easy Substack is to use. It feels lightweight, more casual, and lower stakes. I don’t have to spend so much time optimizing pages, compressing images, using internal linking, etc. For a non-writer, it’s been fun writing this newsletter.
For some of us, we create content with the goal of building a substantial and sustainable revenue stream. Which channel is easier to make money on? Which has the highest revenue potential?
According to Substack’s Going Paid Guide, 5-10% of free subscribers upgrade to paid. Say you charge $5/month for your paid tier. At 5,000 subscribers, you could estimate that you get 500 paid subscribers and generate $2,500/month in revenue. At 10,000 subscribers, that would be $5,000/month. But that math may be a bit optimistic.
Here’s an example of an Instagram influencer, Elise Loehnen, who had 80K followers and converted 12K of them to Substack, of whom 500 pay $8/month, translating to $4,000 in revenue per month. She has other income streams too to supplement this one, and altogether, they allow her to write and produce her podcast.
A friend of mine has the number one education site in a specialized field of study. He started the site over 10 years ago. He invested $100,000 in content that would attract high quality, relevant backlinks. In two years, he got to about 20K-30K visits per month. At that point, he started making $1K-2K per month in lead gen. A year later, he had 70K-80K visits per month with lead gen revenue of $15,000 per month. A year after that, he doubled traffic and brought his ad revenue up to $50K per month.
He’s an example of best-case outcome, because he has the experience and got in “early”:
One other factor to consider is that his content is evergreen, and he's targeting keywords with substantial search volume. Education degrees are big ticket items, and I'll bet those clients can/will pay more for traffic.
If you are creating content that is more news-related or time-sensitive with a shorter shelf-life, then a newsletter may be better for you.
I saw a “stat” that you need 500-1000 visits per day (30K per month) before you’re able to start monetizing your site with ads. This tracks with my friend’s website. It’s no easy lift to get there, particularly if you are a solo creator/founder. But if you have the ability to create lots of quality content consistently and over a long period of time, then a blog could be lucrative. Unless of course Google goes the way of that built-in wall oven.
Both?! Well, we had been experimenting with both, with not much success with our newsletter. To be honest, we weren't clear on our strategy and how to differentiate content across Substack and blog. After taking a pause to rethink, we're going to try and segment our mom content and small business content.
So, Substack = mom and the non-evergreen, low search volume topics.
And, blog = small business. The content that has more search volume.
We'll provide an update on how this is going later on.
But FYI, if you are considering doing both Substack and Newsletter, avoid duplicate content which is bad for SEO. Substack doesn’t let you canonicalize (for good reason). If you are going to duplicate content, you should canonicalize the article on your blog to Substack, but be aware that the article on your blog won't generate organic traffic.
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