Blog to Business Mindset Makeover
If you’ve read my Truth About Blogging post (and you really should), you understand that bloggers are not in the blogging business. They never were. Because blogging doesn’t and never has existed as a business.
Nonetheless, there’s no shortage of coaches and other gurus out there telling bloggers how to “grow their business” or “scale their business.” Or how to “adapt their business” after Google’s Helpful Content Update. So I think we need to look a bit more at the idea of a blog as a business.
To be clear, in this post I’m referring to traditional blogs, those monetized only with ad and maybe affiliate revenue, which is where most bloggers start (and often end up stuck). I call this the A2 blogging model and an A2 blog is NOT a business.
But I know some of you still aren’t convinced of that. So, for you, we’ll start this post by going over three more reasons a traditional blog is not a business.
Then we’ll move on to look at the five mindset shifts you must make to successfully transform your blog into a business.
As I’ve written before, blogging skills aren’t business skills. Bloggers and business owners think very differently. If you want to transition your blog to a business, you need to start thinking like a business owner. The five mindset shifts we discuss here are critical.
But first, let’s revisit that whole “a blog is not a business” thing one more time.
Disclaimer: information on this website is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional business, financial or legal advice.
3 Reasons a Blog is NOT a Business
Reason #1: You Aren’t Selling Anything
By definition, a business sells something. A product or a service. Or maybe just advice. But a business must sell something.
Selling is the core activity of business. If you’re not doing that, you don’t have a business.
“Selling is the core activity of business. If you’re not doing that, you don’t have a business.”
You may think, “well, I sell space on my blog to advertisers.” But most bloggers don’t sell directly to advertisers. Instead, they partner with an ad network. The ad network brokers deals with advertisers. You allow ad networks to put ads on your site, but the network is the one doing the bidding, negotiating and selling.
You may also think, “well, I sell affiliate products.” No, you promote affiliate products. You’re incapable of actually selling affiliate products because you don’t own them. Ultimately, the company that owns the products does the selling. You can review and promote the products. You can inspire or encourage your audience to buy them. But you don’t actually sell them.
Reason #2: You Don’t Have Financial Control
When your blog is monetized only with ads and affiliates, you don’t have control over the money. This is a key distinction between an A2 blog and a business.
Sure, you can decide which ad network to join and which affiliate programs to use. But you don’t decide what your RPMs will be in a given month. Or what the revenue split with your ad network will be. Or what percentage affiliate commission you’ll be paid.
When you have an A2 blog, your earning potential is controlled entirely by other companies.
In contrast, business owners exercise 100% control over financial decision-making. They decide what products and services to sell and at what price. They decide what products and services to buy and at what price. They decide how much to pay themselves and how much to reinvest in their business. Their earning potential isn’t limited by what another company chooses to pay them.
If you don’t exercise full control over decisions about how you earn money, you don’t have business.
Reason #3: You Have No Leverage
Because A2 blogging deprives you of equal financial decision-making, you have no leverage in your business relationships.
An ad network can cut your RPMs whenever it wants to. Or kick you out of the network entirely.
An affiliate partner can reduce your commissions with no warning, as Amazon did in early 2020. Affiliate partners can also restructure the terms of the program or shut the program down completely, also without warning.
In those situations, you have no recourse. You could try to negotiate higher RPMs or commissions, but you aren’t likely to be successful because you aren’t on equal financial footing. The ad networks and affiliate partners know you need them way more than they need you. After all, they’re providing 100% of your income.
“The ad networks and affiliate partners know you need them way more than they need you. After all, they’re providing 100% of your income.”
In contrast, business owners have leverage in their relationships. They decide what products to use, what companies to buy from, what prices they’re willing to pay. If they’re unhappy, they can renegotiate or end contracts, switch to different products or companies or seek out cheaper alternatives.
The bottom line is that, as paying customers, business owners have leverage with companies. A2 bloggers who are ad or affiliate partners don’t.
The Harsh Reality of Blogging
I know this may be hard to hear, especially if you’ve spent years listening to blogging influencers telling you how to manage your “business.” And it may be confusing, too, because blogging feels like a business.
That’s because a hallmark of business ownership is, as economists say, owning the means of production. Bakers own their pans and their ovens, landscapers own their lawn mowers and their edgers. Accountants own their computers and their software, mechanics own their garage and their tools. And bloggers own their websites and their words.
But, as we learned in The Truth About Blogging, blogging disconnects output (content) from income by introducing traffic as a variable. This means that while bloggers may own their content, they don’t own the means of production, since the actual product, the thing they make money from, is traffic. Traffic that is entirely owned (and given) by other companies.
So, ads-and-affiliates bloggers are not business owners. They’re content creators. They’re content promoters. But when it comes to income, the harsh reality is that they’re not business owners. Or even employees. They’re poorly paid independent contractors for ad networks, megacorps and social media platforms.
And before everyone starts screaming at me, yes I know there are some bloggers who make really good money from ad revenue. But those bloggers are rare, a very, very small portion of bloggers overall.
And many of them have been blogging for years, maybe for more than a decade. Do you know how easy it was to build a successful blog in 2014 compared to now?
Back before Facebook suppressed organic reach? Back when Pinterest was just taking off? Back before TikTok and Instagram reduced attention spans to less than 60 seconds? Back before ChatGPT and the Helpful Content Update and the proliferation of AI content on the web?
| Year | Reach |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 16% |
| 2020 | 3% |
| 2025 | 1% |
It is infinitely more difficult to build a financially successful blog now. Infinitely more difficult.
Low ad RPMs are the new normal. Affiliate sales depend on traffic, which is non-existent to a lot of blogs these days.
Bloggers who persist on the A2 path aren’t business owners. They’re not working for themselves. They’re working for the ad networks, social media platforms and affiliate companies who exercise full control over how much (or in most cases, how little) they earn.
If you want a chance at real financial success you need to break free from the lopsided business relationships that underpin traditional blogging.
“If you want a chance at real financial success you need to break free from the lopsided business relationships that underpin traditional blogging.”
You need to stop working for whatever ad networks and affiliate programs are willing to pay you. You need to stop posting content on social media with no guaranteed return.
No real business operates on a bunch of relationships where they do all the work, take all the risks and have no leverage or negotiating power. Why would any one sign on for that???
Yet bloggers do. They persist, even as their “business partners” do things that actively harm them and their mental health, like slashing affiliate commissions, reducing RPMs, changing algorithms and killing their traffic.
It’s nonsense, y’all. Non.Sense.
Now, if you enjoy the nonsense, by all means, carry on.
But if you’re tired of blogging broke, then it’s time for a change. It’s time to start a real business.
The problem is that, as I’ve mentioned before (in that Truth post you really need to read), running a blog and owning a business are two very different things. The typical blogging mentality can really hold you back when it comes to pivoting to business ownership.
To help, I’ve outlined five mindset shifts, the mindset makeover, if you will, that you’ll need to make to transition from blogger to business owner.
Blogger to Business Owner Mindset Makeover
Mindset Makeover #1: A Blog is a Marketing Tool
If you want to pivot away from traditional blogging toward selling your own products and services, you need to change your mindset about blogging. Going forward, your blog is a marketing tool for your business. Blogging is a marketing tactic in your marketing plan.
This mindset shift can be difficult, especially if you’ve been trying to make traditional blogging work for a long time. But once you have products and services of your own to sell, you need to refocus your blog on promoting them.
Your blog posts should serve a purpose:
- to help people get to know you or your brand
- to help them better understand what you offer
- to provide them a preview of your products
- to get them into a marketing funnel
- some other relevant business goal
Every blog post needs to have a business purpose. No more publishing posts based on keywords in an effort to drive traffic. You’re done with all that.
If you’ve wandered around in blogging land for awhile, you’ve probably noticed this trend: the more money bloggers make from their own product sales, the less they blog.
I’ve seen really successful bloggers, those with big money-making products and services, publish as few as two or three new posts a year.
I’ve seen others who only have 10 to 20 posts total that they update year-to-year. These are typically long, foundational posts, sometimes called pillar posts, that relate directly to a product or service. They’re sales-driven posts, not sessions-driven posts.
Selling your own products and using your blog to promote them is the cure for blogger burnout. When you use your blog as a marketing tool for your business, you only publish as much as needed to achieve your business goals.
You can hop off the content treadmill, that need to publish new content regularly in hopes of growing your traffic. No more wracking your brain for topics or writing posts around low competition keywords that may only generate 20 visits a month. Instead, you only publish according to your business and marketing plans.
Mindset Makeover #2: Purpose Outweighs Passion
People usually start blogs because there’s something they care about and want to share. And I’ve seen plenty of blog coaches and gurus tell people to choose a niche they’re passionate about. But I’ve also seen plenty of bloggers get burned out and lose passion for their topic. Because trying to turn your passion into your profession is the fastest way to kill it.
The truth is, if you want to make a living from your passion, you need to be passionate about the work, not just the niche or topic. Plenty of businesses fail because people misunderstand or underestimate the work needed to make their passion profitable. And they find out that the work itself isn’t very enjoyable.
I think this is especially true for bloggers. Yes, bloggers like to write, but there’s so much more to blogging than that: setting up and maintaining a website, making Pinterest pins or Facebook posts or TikTok reels, writing and sending emails, living with the hope and despair of algorithm changes and RPM fluctuations. That is the work of blogging. And without passion for the work it’s hard to stick with it, no matter how much you may love your niche.
Which highlights another important mindset shift: you don’t need to be passionate about what your niche is, you need to be passionate about what your business does. Your niche should obviously be something you like and know about, but to succeed in business you need to be passionate about helping the people you’ve chosen to help in the way(s) you’ve chosen to help them. In other words, your purpose must outweigh your passion.
You don’t need to be passionate about what your niche is, you need to be passionate about what your business does. To succeed in business, you need to be passionate about helping the people you’ve chosen to help in the way(s) you’ve chosen to help them. In other words, your purpose must outweigh your passion.
My business is providing bloggers business advice and helping them understand business finances. And I really like studying business and tax law. But I don’t lay awake at night thinking about those things. I don’t wake up in the morning excited to watch a webinar on pricing strategy or to take a course on self-employment taxes. That’s not my passion.
I do lay awake at night thinking of better ways to explain tax law. I wake up thinking about how to better represent business concepts in diagrams or charts or tables. Basically, what gets and keeps me awake is figuring out how to better communicate and teach topics in my niche. Communicating and teaching. Those are my purpose and I’m pretty passionate about the work of doing them.
Businesses, aside from those providing for essential needs, have one of three purposes: to solve, to serve or to soothe. The work of building a business is a slog no matter what, but it’s much easier when you have a clear and compelling sense of purpose. So, you need to make sure you pick the right purpose for your business. And the right business model. Both of these topics are discussed in much more detail inside the Creator Business Club.
Mindset Makeover #3: Stop Monetizing, Start Marketing
I wrote above that many bloggers burnout because they’re trying to profit from their passion. And that instead, they should emphasize purpose over passion. Both of those things are true. But no matter how strong your passion or sense of purpose, if you can’t market, you won’t make it.
And to be clear, monetizing and marketing are two different things. I wrote a lot about this in the Truth About Blogging post. The gist is that in traditional blogging, monetizing relies almost entirely on promotion. And while promotion does drive traffic, it doesn’t drive sales. To sell, you need to market. You need to actively cultivate customers and make direct offers to them.
If that doesn’t appeal to you, then pivoting your blog into a product or service probably isn’t the right path for you. And that’s okay. Not everyone wants to be a business owner. But please don’t avoid this path just because you think marketing is sleazy.
Can marketing be sleazy? Yes, of course it can. But it isn’t inherently sleazy and won’t be unless you choose to make it so.
If you look at the sales page for the CBC membership, you’ll notice it’s a FAQ page. I organized it that way because I hate typical sales pages in the blogging industry.
You know the ones I’m talking about. The colorful sales pages with flat lays of all the printables inside the course, bullet points describing content inside the course, and a list of all the supposed bonuses that are actually just part of the course. They all follow the same format, often because they’re using the same templates.
When I started to draft my sales page, I knew it would be different. I figured other people are just as tired of marketing hype as I am, so I wanted a simple, straightforward sales page that answers the critical questions: what’s in this membership, how will it benefit me and how much does it cost? That’s what people really care about. And they shouldn’t have to scroll through 10 screens of marketing fluff to find answers to their questions.
The point here isn’t that traditional sales pages are sleazy. That’s a feature of the marketer, not the marketing. The point is that you can market however you want to. If you want the long, colorful sales page and it converts for you, then go for it. If you don’t, then you can do something else.
Just don’t let negative feelings you have about other peoples’ marketing be the reason you won’t try it yourself. That would be a shame.
Don’t let negative feelings you have about other peoples’ marketing be the reason you won’t try it yourself. That would be a shame.
Mindset Makeover #4: Sales Outweigh Sessions
I’ve written about this before too, so won’t spend a lot of time on it here. But transitioning from blogger to business owner means changing how you define success.
Bloggers tend to define success by the number of sessions they get each month. Or pageviews. Or whatever their ad network uses to determine how much they get paid. Business owners define success by the number of sales they make.
The longer you’ve been blogging, the harder this mindset shift might be. When you’ve spent years chasing traffic, it can be difficult to refocus on chasing conversions. But ultimately that’s what you need to do if you want to transform your blog into a business.
Mindset Makeover #5: Leads are Better than Subscribers
I’ve seen lots of bloggers start email lists because they’ve heard they should have one. I’ve also seen lots of bloggers fail to understand that building an email list is the first stage of a marketing funnel. Everyone has heard “the money is in the list.” But if you don’t have a plan for what to do with your list, your marketing funnel is going to function more like a toilet drain.
The key to making money from your list is having a clear offer to make. You can’t really plan a marketing funnel if you have nothing to offer.
Too many bloggers start email lists because they’ve been told they should have one. What they end up with is a list of subscribers, many of whom may not be in the target market for whatever products the blogger eventually creates. Then the blogger wonders why they struggle to sell to their list.
To successfully sell to people on your list, you need to know what you’ll sell them before they sign up. Even if you don’t have the product already created, you need to know what it will be. Without an idea of what you’ll sell, there’s nothing for you to market. And you can’t build a marketing funnel around nothing (though that seems to be the approach a lot bloggers take, TBH).
You need to reframe your thinking about your email list: stop thinking of it as a subscriber list and start thinking of it as a leads list. A list of people who have shown interest in your product or service and want to learn more.
Having a list of 400 people who’ve signed up to learn more about your product and your business is way better than having a list of 4,000 randoms who opted into a freebie that doesn’t go anywhere because you don’t have a marketing funnel.
A Plug for My Membership (at least I’m honest about what we’re doing here)
I started the Creator Business Club (CBC) specifically for bloggers who want to (and are ready to) pivot to business ownership.
CBC is divided into two modules: starting and scaling.
The starting module is basically a business bootcamp. In this module, you’ll identify a target market, determine your MVP (minimum viable product) and develop a go-to-market plan. You’ll also learn about business finance basics, including tax issues for small business owners and the self-employed.
The scaling module includes information and resources you’ll need as your business grows, including information on forming LLCs and hiring freelancers or employees. This module also covers more advanced financial and tax advice, such as self-employed retirement options and S-corp taxation.
You can learn more about CBC here. Just be aware that CBC isn’t your typical membership.
- CBC isn’t open to everyone. Instead, it’s by application only.
- CBC is only open during certain times the year and each new cohort is limited to about 30 people.
- Everyone is required to sign a set of community guidelines before they start CBC program.
- And everyone undergoes a four week onboarding process once accepted into the program.
All of this is to ensure we have a respectful, supportive and collaborative group dynamic. If working with like-minded bloggers in that kind of environment appeals to you, be sure to check out the FAQ page.
