There’s a particular kind of torture that comes with publishing a blog post into the void. You hit publish, share it across your social channels, maybe send it to your email list if you have one, and then you wait. The analytics trickle in slowly. Maybe you get fifty views. Maybe a hundred if you’re lucky. A handful of people spend an average of forty-two seconds on your carefully crafted two thousand word piece. Nobody comments. Nobody shares it. The world continues spinning as if you hadn’t just poured three hours of your life into explaining something you care deeply about.
This is where most people quit. They look at the immediate return on their investment of time and energy and see nothing that justifies continuing. The math doesn’t math. Three hours of work for fifty anonymous eyeballs feels like a losing proposition, especially when you could have spent that time doing literally anything else that produces more tangible, immediate results.
But here’s what makes blogging so deceptively difficult to evaluate: it operates on a timescale that our brains aren’t wired to appreciate. We’re built for immediate feedback loops. We want to know right now whether something worked. Blogging refuses to play by these rules.When you publish a blog post today, you’re not really publishing for today. You’re publishing for eighteen months from now when someone searches for exactly the problem you solved and finds your post on page one of Google. You’re publishing for two years from now when you’ve built up enough interconnected content that people start seeing you as an authority and actually remember your name. You’re publishing for three years from now when a potential client is deciding between you and a competitor, googles both of you, and finds that you have this rich archive of thoughtful writing while your competitor has a website that hasn’t been updated since they launched it.
The cruelty of blogging is that none of this is visible in the moment. You can’t see the compounding effect while you’re in month three, staring at your pathetic traffic numbers and wondering why you’re bothering. The compound interest of content doesn’t become apparent until you’ve been making deposits for long enough that the returns start to dwarf the individual contributions.
I’ve watched this play out dozens of times with people who stick with it. In year one, their blog feels like shouting into a canyon. They get echo, maybe, but no real response. In year two, things start to shift imperceptibly. They notice they’re getting a few inbound leads who mention finding them through a blog post. Their newsletter slowly grows from fifty subscribers to two hundred. They start ranking for some long-tail keywords. In year three, something clicks. Traffic compounds. Opportunities multiply. People introduce them as “that person who writes about X.” What looked like failure for twenty-four months suddenly looks like the smartest investment they ever made.
The problem is surviving those first two years. The problem is continuing to publish when every single post feels like it disappears into a black hole. The problem is maintaining conviction that you’re building something valuable when the metrics tell you that you’re building nothing at all.
This is why most advice about blogging is useless. People tell you to “be consistent” and “provide value” and “optimize for SEO” as if the challenge is tactical. The real challenge is psychological. The real challenge is doing something that produces no dopamine hit, no immediate validation, no clear signal that you’re on the right path. The real challenge is faith.You have to believe that the twenty-third post you publish will work together with the forty-seventh post you publish and the sixty-first post you publish to create something greater than the sum of its parts. You have to believe that Google’s algorithm rewards depth and consistency over time. You have to believe that people actually do research and actually do care about expertise, even if they don’t always comment or share or make their appreciation visible.
The only way to measure blogging ROI accurately is to pick a sufficiently long time horizon that you can actually see the compound effects. If you measure month to month, you’ll almost certainly quit. If you measure quarter to quarter, you might stick around long enough to see some green shoots, but you still won’t see the real payoff. You need to measure in years. You need to commit to at least two years of consistent output before you evaluate whether it’s working.
This feels impossibly long in a world of instant feedback and immediate metrics. We can see our tweet impressions in real-time. We can watch our Instagram stories’ view counts tick up minute by minute. We can track our ad spend ROI down to the penny. Blogging offers none of this immediate gratification. It asks you to make a leap of faith that most people, quite reasonably, are unwilling to make.
But for those who do make that leap, who do put in the work when it feels pointless, who do keep publishing into the void, the returns eventually become undeniable. Not because blogging magically starts working differently in year three. But because you finally have enough time and enough content for the compound effects to become visible. The investment you made in month six starts paying dividends in month thirty. The post you wrote in year one becomes your highest traffic page in year three.
The impossibility of blogging in the moment is a feature, not a bug. It filters out everyone who isn’t willing to invest in something without immediate returns. It creates a moat around your attention and expertise that competitors can’t easily cross because they’re not willing to do the unrewarded work for long enough. It makes the eventual payoff that much more valuable because so few people have the patience to claim it.
So yes, blog ROI is impossible to measure in the moment. The only honest way to evaluate it is to measure in years, accept that the first year or two will feel like failure, and trust that you’re building something that only reveals its value with time. It’s not a satisfying answer. But it’s the true one.
