Nobody likes a quitter
And nobody likes to quit.
But the reality is that most bloggers DO quit, and often it’s the smart choice. A study found that nearly 95% of blogs are eventually abandoned.
Personally, I’ve quit two blogs myself, and now I’m on my third, which I’ve been writing on for the last two years. It’s my longest streak yet.
Why did I quit the other two?
This might seem odd, but the fact is that the blogs I was working on simply ran the course, and my interests changed.
For example, I used to have a travel blog that I worked on for two years, but then we stopped backpacking, so it made sense to shift to business, which I was more interested in. I didn’t want to be a travel blogger for the rest of my life, so I stopped.
Later on, I started my own project, and it just made sense to focus all my efforts on my business and away from my brand, so I merged my business blog into my new business.
That makes sense, right?
The question, is how do you know when it’s time to give up on your blog?
You’ve Lost Interest
Blogging is largely fueled by passion. Passion for your topic. Passion in engaging with your audience. Passion for writing.
When you’ve lost that passion, it’s a clear sign that you need to
- Take a break and reflect
- Try something completely different
- Drop it altogether
Because a blog that isn’t fueled by passion is going to reflect in its writing, and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever garner an audience with sub-par, passionless writing.
And without that, hopes of making money are close to none.
Ideally, before you completely burn yourself out, you can take measures to take a break once in awhile or try a new type of blog post to reenergize yourself.
You Can’t Afford A Writer
A potential solution to not being interested in yourself is to hire someone else.
Unfortunately, this is not an option for every business. A decent writer can easily cost at least $20 an hour, and a decent post can take over 4 hours to write.
Doing the math, producing a post even just once a week is going to be $320 a month – and that’s probably the minimum.
For some businesses that might not be much, but if you’re just struggling to get by, it’s likely not a cost you can afford given just how long it can take to achieve results via content marketing.
And yes, there are services out there that can write you a blog post for $20, but I don’t think it’s the kind of quality that is going to change your situation if your blog is already struggling.
You’re Not Getting Justifiable Results
Blogging is a lot of effort and while we all should know by now that few people are an overnight success if you’re not starting to see results on the scale of months, either you’re doing something wrong, or perhaps your business/niche just doesn’t respond to blogging well.
Eventually, you have to justify blogging to yourself, just like any other marketing channel that you would consider.
You should never just do something because everyone says it works – you have to go out and prove it to yourself.
Moreover, if you’re getting results elsewhere such as in social media, you will likely be better off focusing your time and effort there.
So, if you find yourself in this position I recommend setting a goal and a date, for example, to have 10k visitors a month by the end of the year. That way, you’ve decided upfront what is worth the effort and have a clear reason to quit if you don’t hit it.
Conclusion
Nobody likes to quit because they don’t want to give up on the dream they had when they first started, such as a popular blog and hundreds of leads/traffic that fill your business daily.
But the reality is that sometimes the smart thing to do is to quit.
Of course, that’s not to say that you should quit and do nothing, but that you should try something else.
Can you revisit blogging again in the future? Yes – always. Try coming up with some unique branding and buy a domain name that reflects it. This may yield better results next time!
However, before quitting, always try to do something a bit different, such as a new type of blog post.
Because you never know what might produce results and turn the entire thing around. After all, blogging is a lot about patience, so don’t give up too early, but also don’t languish when you know it’s over.
