I have a question – is B2B blogging dead?
This isn’t going to be the “B2B blog” version of “is SEO dead?” (the answer to that is: maybe, maybe not, it depends, it’s changing), I promise.
But I think right now is the right time to have the conversation about blogging and if all of the things going on with the Internet are finally adding up to BUSINESS blogs (B2B, business-to-business) dying?
My Story With Online Content and Writing
Who am I, and why am I writing about, and qualified to write about this topic?
Well, I’ve been writing on the internet since 1999, when I launched my first Xanga blog. I then wrote on Blogspot, then spun up a Joomla! site, and I’ve been writing on WordPress (like I am right now) since 2010. In fact, I owe my whole career to blogging. Seriously.
I owe my whole career to blogging because it got me the job at Distilled in New York City in 2011. I had started my personal site, at the time called “The Beginner SEO” (I’m seriously terrible at branding, though I think getting better), and then live-blogged the Linklove conference in London in March 2011, where I met the Distilled crew. At that conference, they announced that they were opening a New York City office. I lived in Philadelphia at the time, and did NOT want to move to New York (I had convinced myself I didn’t like New York), but told myself I’d give it a chance if I got the job.
Long story short, I got the job, largely because my blog had received some attention in the industry. I moved to New York and lived there for 2.5 years. I got to blog on big industry sites like Moz, did some Whiteboard Fridays (Moz’s weekly video series. This was 2011-2013, people, early days!), got to speak at big conferences, and so on. That then got me the job at Zillow, which moved us to San Francisco. I built the marketing team at HotPads, Zillow’s rentals brand, and did things like grow the blog from 600 to 60,000+ visitors per month in about 9 months. I know how to grow blogs. Interestingly, too, HotPads killed its blog many years ago (I stopped checking their traffic many years ago too, so I just came across this as I wrote this article):

When I got laid off I was able to quickly spin up SEO consulting and get my first company, Credo (which I sold in 2022), off the ground. I built Credo off the back of content and its blog. I wrote hundreds of articles for that site, which drove tens of thousands of qualified visits per month. I published some big studies, including the digital agency pricing survey and the SaaS SEO guide (basically, a book published in chapters online), which catapulted us to the top of Google’s search rankings for not just the informational queries, but also “SaaS SEO agencies” and other keywords.

And, to be honest, I’ve largely built EditorNinja off the back of content. We rank pretty well for many of our main keywords, but we’ve also ranked well for a lot of top of funnel informational queries. But I’ll be honest again, that has stopped working as well in recent months.

I’ve done the things I know to do – update old content, write new content, fix technical debt, interlink articles. There’s more that could be done, of course, but the level of effort I’ve put in has always shown better results in the past than it is now.
All this to say – I’m in it with all of you right now. I’m actively trying to figure out what’s changed, and what to do next. I even had a conversation with an industry colleague last week where they said, “I sometimes wonder if I’m trying to build a consultancy in an industry that’s dying.”
That hit me, because I had thought about this myself. I looked at trends for EditorNinja’s offering specifically and arrived at “it’s not growing, but it’s not shrinking, and that’s better than shrinking,” but it’s still a scary thought to have.

SEO and Content Have Changed
This was 2017-2022. SEO was easy, effective, and dare I say, even fun. I knew I could write, optimize, publish, and promote, and that would result in rankings and traffic.
But things have changed in the last few years. So many companies came online in 2020-2022 with the pandemic closing down in-person businesses and accelerating the shift to online commerce for many. Don’t get me wrong, this was great for Credo, as we saw a big bump (after an initial dip in March/April of 2020) in companies looking to hire agencies.
This also brought a LOT more companies online who were being told they needed to “produce content,” so they hired agencies or freelancers to write “SEO blogs,” which were basically regurgitated optimized crap written in a specific format (the classic “what is X” even on bottom of funnel technical articles) specifically meant to rank.
And here’s the thing – IT FRICKIN WORKED.
Companies got a ton of traffic from this! The more “SEO content” they could crank out, the better!
But then came a few tectonic shifts:
- ChatGPT launched in November 2022 (coincidentally, about 6 weeks after I sold my last company to go full-time on EditorNinja)
- Google’s “Helpful Content Updates” in December 2022, September 2023, and March 2024 (this one not officially, but “Google claimed that the latest changes will reduce unhelpful content in search results by 40%” (via Moz)).
AI content means that companies can create hundreds, thousands of articles at the click of a button. Is it any good? Who cares! It’s CONTENT.
I think AI is one of the biggest threats to great content on the Internet. Now, we edit a lot of AI content (hundreds of thousands of words of it a month) at EditorNinja, and we have an AI-generated content writing offering (we use Brandwell for this). I’m not disputing that. But we take a very different approach than people just generating hundreds of articles, not looking at them at all or adding anything unique to them, and just publishing them. We take a very human-centric approach to AI content, which is the only way I was willing to even consider this. And we may close these offerings down if we cease to be able to keep quality up to my very high bar!
The Helpful Content Update was arguably (but it’s my opinion, so I’m going with it) a much larger impact, at least short term, than AI. Overnight, a ton of sites lost 80-90%+ of their organic traffic, which is what their business was built off of. Social media went berserk (and Google tried to correct this with the March 2024 update, and kind of did), a lot of content sites just folded up and the creators went and tried to get jobs.
B2B Blogging Changed Along The Way
Blogging used to be about people sharing what they were thinking about and wanted to teach to others. People like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income (which is now SPI Media and Pat is not the CEO), Tim Ferriss with his 4 Hour Work Week blog (interestingly, he’s started longform blogging again), Mr Money Mustache (which looks like it was last redesigned in 2007), and many more that were super niche.
Over time, though, many blogs became businesses with teams to support and partners/advertisers to make happy.
Every piece of content became an economic equation. It had to drive a certain amount of traffic that meant a certain amount of money based on a CPM (cost per mille, or thousand) that the advertiser was willing to pay to get in front of that audience.
Because of this, we’ve seen way fewer bloggers actually doing what got them attention in the first place – writing about the stuff they’re learning and that their audience really cares about! They became so focused on net new traffic and customers, that they forgot about the very thing that built the whole empire anyways.
Obviously there are examples you could point out where this isn’t the case, but by and large, it’s what I’ve seen.
B2B blogging changed. It stopped being about engaged audiences, and started being about “SEO blogs” and new customers.
Layoffs Are Common
With the “Helpful Content Update(s),” a lot of business websites have lost a lot of traffic and therefore business, and keeping full-time staff around has ceased to make a lot of sense. Either they’re cutting their program completely and focusing on one or two channels (often ads), or they’re keeping one person around to project manage content coming through and then outsourcing it to freelancers (and services like EditorNinja).
In my 14 years of professional marketing experience, I have NEVER seen layoffs of this level. We saw them short-term when the Covid-19 pandemic started, but that was an act-of-God sort of event and quickly rebounded.
Now, I’m hearing daily to weekly about content marketers getting laid off and struggling to find work. Many great content marketers have been out of work for months. Many have tried to go freelance, but have found that to be super challenging right now as well (I run an agency, trust me, it is). As I saw one write recently, “I have no income, no output, and a lack of ideas.”
Here’s another who’s really struggled to find work:

The companies who are hiring are indundated with a ton of qualified candidates. There may be multiple great candidates who would do well, and the company has to make a choice. That means one gets the job, and all the others don’t.
It’s never been this hard to be a B2B content marketer, especially one WRITING content (people are hiring a ton for video editors and social media writers).
The WordPress Debacle
Something recently happened in the online world that really got me started thinking about this even more.
The long story short, or tl;DR (too long, didn’t read), is that the founder of WordPress tried to extort a competitor, locked them out of being able to update their plugins in the supposedly “free open source” WordPress.org (the open source self-hosted version), had 9% of his company take a $30k buyout to leave the company, STOLE a plugin with millions of installs from the afore-mentioned competitor, and has within a couple of weeks irreparably broken trust with almost all of the WordPress community.
WordPress will continue in one way or another. Maybe the full open source project will get forked and rolled out under a different name. Maybe the founder will come to his senses (unlikely).
When this happened, I started considering, for the first time in 14 years, moving my sites and future development away from WordPress.
To what? I’m not sure yet.
But the fallout is already happening, and we’re seeing companies pause their planned investment into WordPress because of the drama and instability.


For better or worse, WordPress is the leading blogging platform for businesses. But for how long?
Only time will tell.
What’s Next? Is B2B Blogging Dead?
I saw someone post this today (Source):

I don’t think B2B blogging is dead. But I do think the tides are shifting and we need to be aware of them.
In the past, someone like Justin Welsh, who unabashedly makes millions of dollars per year from courses and communities, would have a website generating hundreds of thousands of visits per month. But when I look at Semrush for his site justinwelsh.me, there’s very little traffic relatively:

But his LinkedIn profile has over 647,000 followers! He doesn’t have to blog! He has a huge audience on LinkedIn who will buy what he sells!

B2B blogging is changing. I actually think that content marketing, at least writing, is a dying industry. Maybe it just got too big because it was easy and now it’s self-correcting back to where it should have been all along.
How B2B Companies Can Still Succeed With Content
Lest I come across as a total doomsayer (though, I’ve been in this space for a long time and it’s the toughest environment for content I have ever seen), I do believe there is still opportunity in content.
But I think we have to shift how we think about content.
We have to shift away from thinking about “SEO blogs” and gaming the algorithms.
We have to shift away from the economics of content and direct attribution of revenue back to content produced.
We have to get back to the core of what blogging was – people with something to say saying things that others want to read and engage with. It’s not that people don’t read – it’s that what we’re putting in front of them isn’t worth reading.
My old friend Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and now Sparktoro, used to say something to the effect of “why would I want to rank for a keyword with 10,000 searches per month and get 20% of the clicks, when I can build a brand that gets hundreds of thousands of searches per month and gets all of those clicks?” And that’s what he’s done with Sparktoro. He’s even said that they’re not investing in SEO at all. I’m sure their site is well-built for SEO, but they’re building a BRAND.

He has a point. Sure, we might find 80 articles that we could write that cumulatively have 100,000 searches per month. That’s great, and honestly, I say go and write that content.
But don’t ONLY write that content. Also write hot takes, strong opinions, and things that no one else is writing. If others can find the data and write the content, then it’s not something that’s going to change the game for you.
Go create:
- Thought pieces (like this one!)
- Actionable things teaching your ideal customers how to actually do what you do (because they’ll then hire you)
- Epic guides
- Books
- Videos! Yes, videos! People love videos, so give it to them.
If a B2B company is going to succeed with content, it’s not going to be “SEO blogs” anymore. That was always going to be short term, and that ship is fast sailing over the horizon.
Let’s get back to creating cool stuff.
*Addendum – I came across this quote from Om Malik talking about “pure blogging,” which captures what I was trying to say in a succinct way. Here’s the quote:
“Blogging is an individual and, I would say, selfish act — you do it because it is what you want to do for you.” Pure blogging is “blogging” because you have something to say. To me, that ability is what makes you a pure blogger. Any other explanation of blogging “is just the traditional idea of media,” meant for an audience and reach.
Source