For anyone wondering, “Do I Still Need a Blog in 2026?”
Kim Kardashian voice: Nobody wants to get their ass up and write a blog anymore.
I’m going to be super honest with you here, I love a blog.
It’s one of the great sadnesses of my life that my content marketing career is peaking in the age of TikTok and not Blogspot. Not having to convince anyone long-form is worth investing in sounds like heaven.
And yet… There is hope for me.
Because I have a sneaking suspicion (read: hard and fast evidence) that long-form is back, baby.
Are blogs dead?
No. But they’re definitely not working like they used to.
Audiences haven't stopped reading, but they have become a lot pickier about what they read.
Think about how much content you're exposed to every single day. You've got LinkedIn posts, Instagram Reels, TikToks, podcasts, mailers, sponsored ads, and everything else. And it’s all catapulted at you the minute you open your phone or laptop or watch or Smart Fridge (I’m not even joking).
Everybody wants you to follow them, subscribe to their mailing list, join their community, download their free guide and, eventually, buy something from them. And your audience quite literally cannot consume everything they see. So they've adapted.
Now, they’re amazing at spotting generic content, and even better at scrolling straight past it.
But way too many of us are still churning out weekly blogs full of semi-relevant keywords and lukewarm takes our audience could’ve guessed themselves. Things like:
5 of the Biggest Challenges in the XX Industry Right Now (Is it AI and an unpredicatable economy by any chance?)
XX Industry Trends in 2026 (Already read it, in January, from a source I trust)
Why You Should Work With Me/Us (Not invested enough to care yet, sorry, won’t click through)
These blogs are dead.
And if you’re putting them out, I think you probably already know that. Because chances are, you’re doing it for less than a hundred views and a handful of likes, and quite literally nothing else.
Blogs should be working for you
We don’t subsribe to vanity metrics around here, so trust me when I say a blog doesn't need ten thousand views to be considered successful. But it does need to do something.
Because if it's getting no traffic, no enquiries, no subscribers, no search visibility, and nobody is clicking through from social... Then I'd ask, very gently, what is the point?
Your blogs should be doing at least one of these things to not be considered a waste of time:
Driving search engine/generative AI traffic to your website
Driving traffic to your website from social
Making you seem like authority in your industry to a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise know you
The first is my main motivation for updating my own web blog (which you are reading right now, hi). I won’t pretend it’s for any other reason. I don’t promote them on social (much), and I don’t use them to convert directly. But they do the job I need them to do.
In fact, one blog, Let's Talk About AI Giveaways, accounted for around 20% of literally all the traffic to my website until June 2026. (Then I accidentally deleted everything during a website rebrand and had to publish a new version, but the less said about that the better. Don't hire me for technical SEO. I am not the one.)
What I’m saying is, if your blogs aren’t doing any of the above, then you, my friend, have yourself a very time consuming but ultimately pointless hobby.
But before you sack it all off and channel your energy into TikTok videos instead of writing, consider the fact that long-form might still work for you, just in a different format.
I’m talking newsletters, mailers, podcasts, membership tiers and exclusive content…
Long-form content, what’s in it for you?
One of the biggest reasons I advocate for long-form has nothing to do with SEO. It's because I don't like renting my audience.
Social media is brilliant, I do a lot of work there. But at the end of the day, all that work is building on someone else's platform. The algorithm changes. Reach disappears overnight. Your account gets hacked or banned for no reason (this almost happened to me and it was the worst week of my life). A platform falls out of fashion. Whatever it is, you're relying on someone else to decide whether your audience gets to hear from you.
An email list is your direct line to your audience on your terms.
Those people have actively chosen to hear from you. They recognise your name. They've invited you into their inbox. So when your next launch rolls around, you're not crossing your fingers and hoping the algorithm behaves itself. You're talking directly to people who already know, like and trust you.
And that’s an incredibly powerful position to be in in 2026.
How to make your long-form content worth reading
Loads of people are absolutely killing it with thoughtful, engaging long-form content.
I grew my own Substack newsletter from 0 - 4.5k without importing a single contact or advertising out-of-platform. One of those newsletters generated 600 new subscribers on its own. And that’s a humble brag, but it’s also proof that people are willing to engage with quality long-form. Our attention spans are not so messed up that we’re beyond help.
There's a reason founder-led content is having such a moment right now. The people yearn for real talk. For content that's actually been thought through by the writer.
When I think about myself as a consumer, here's what I'd actually take time out of my day to read:
An opinion piece from someone I already follow and trust
A hot (and specific) take that says something new
The thing you’d say if you weren’t trying to sound polished or professional
Insider updates about something that directly impacts me that I can engage with in the comments
Nail your long-form strategy
If you take one thing away from this blog, let it be this:
You never need long-form content for the sake of it, you need an actual point of view. That means committing to showing personality, taking a stance on industry issues, reacting to news, treating the space like a communication ecosystem, not a broadcast channel for your AI-generated trends updates.
So if you’re willing to develop opinions, share experiences, react to what's happening in your industry and write like an actual human being...
Then yes. Long-form is so back, baby.
And I don't think it's going anywhere soon.