$10 Per Post and Other Delusions
Why paying $10 per post for blog promotion is a waste of money for personal bloggers. The difference between business content marketing and authentic writing.
Blogging Outside Format. A Manifesto, Post #5/14
I paid for ads. $10 per post on NotionSkull — built-in Instagram promotion. That was client acquisition money, not blog growth money. A business expense, not vanity.
And it worked. When you're making roughly $1,000 from a new client, spending $100 to get them makes sense. The math is simple. You don't have to wait for organic shares to slowly grow your audience. Pay for clients today — get them today. If you're lucky.
That last part matters.
No guarantees
Plenty of channels stuffed with bots. Plenty of admins who are flaky assholes. Ad exchanges and agencies are either a headache or expensive. Usually both. Don't stumble into this solo — talk to someone who's been burned before. There's a ton of platform-specific knowledge that changes by the month.
Organic reach has collapsed everywhere. Instagram — 3.5%. Facebook — 1.3%. LinkedIn — down 60% from its peak. Paid promotion became the only path to visibility. For a business, that's fine. For a personal blog, it's a trap.
Business blog vs. personal blog
Here's when paid ads actually make sense:
Business blog. You make money from clients. Each new client pays back the ad spend. This isn't promoting a blog — it's marketing through writing. ROI is measurable.
Media project. You need people who'll see the ads you're going to sell later. Then yes — run ads, run giveaways, grow the numbers.
Giveaways work for broad-appeal channels — tech, politics, lifestyle. When anyone who shows up is a valid reader. But be ready: after a giveaway, a huge chunk of those new people will leave. That's normal, but it can look like a scam signal to the platform.
Personal blog? That money is better spent on the craft, not the promotion. A bought audience didn't show up out of love. They'll leave the moment a post doesn't match what they expected.
If I had the money
If I had enough money — I'd just do the blog. If I didn't need to work to live — I'd write. And learn to write better. And get better at it.
I wouldn't buy ads. Wouldn't hire a social media manager. Wouldn't run giveaways.
I'd just write. Every day. Get better.
This isn't about ads being evil. Ads are a tool. But for a personal blog, the best tool is time spent writing. Ten dollars per post won't make the text feel alive. A thousand hours of practice will.
Email marketing returns $36 for every dollar spent. Impressive? Sure — if you're running marketing. Funnels, conversions, CTAs. That's not "I wrote something honest and want people to read it." There's no formula for the second thing. Just time and honesty.
