How to have influence without traffic or readers

People used to read blogs because they were worth reading. People wrote about their own experiences in their own voice. There are some corners of the internet where this still happens, but it feels rare. Tom Critchlow calls this small b blogging:

Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.

This was the advent of content. Human beings writing in their own voice about their own experiences. Joel Gascoigne writing about transparency at Buffer, Rand Fishkin sharing Whiteboard Fridays that felt more like a passionate educator than a CEO, Annie Cushing helping us learn how to use Google Analytics, etc. It was a wonderful time because blogging and marketing overlapped in a way that was truly enjoyable for both the creators and the consumers.

The end of the blog era

Then something shifted. Blogs stopped being an outlet for creativity and education when SEO became the top priority. You could publish content and attract people to your site via search and email and (back in those days) even social media. It worked for a while but over time, the blog become a place to put stuff rather than a place to share ideas. A box to be checked, a Trello card to be moved.

The content playbook converged into a mostly homogeneous set of tactics. And still, it mostly worked. Plenty of companies benefitted from building a content culture and growing an audience. And plenty of content marketers found good jobs at tech companies pursuing this strategy.

But here in 2026, it’s difficult to get people to come to your site at all, let alone to read content. It started as the “no click” era of content (and maybe should be called the “no read” era too) and it’s incredibly frustrating for content marketers for a handful of reasons: it’s harder to attribute content, harder to earn compound returns, harder to reach new people, and frankly, it’s a lot less fun.

It’s easy to blame the platforms that want to keep all the engagement for themselves, but content marketers played a role in this as well. For all the talk of “writing for humans and not algorithms,” we kind of had to write for algorithms as a way to hopefully reach humans. The human part was indirect and therefore the work was compromised. The writing wasn’t always really meant to be read, but to be discovered.

As I sit here today, I can’t even remember the last time I read a blog post on a SaaS website that wasn’t a data report (e.g. Ramp’s Economics Lab is always good) or directly about a product I was using or considering (e.g. a Granola update because I’m eager to find new ways to use AI). A rare exception is thought leadership article from PostHog’s blog called Collaboration Sucks. Beyond that, I’m not even sure how to find long-form B2B content anymore besides Substack.

Should SaaS companies bother creating content?

Teaser: yes.

I took a look in the Superpath #reading-list channel and found Substack articles (many of which are excellent), podcasts, journalism, data reports and occasionally a LinkedIn post. Our own consumption can tell us everything we need to know about our ICP’s behavior. No one shares SaaS blog content because it’s not stuff people actually like to read.

We (and yes I’m including myself) milked SEO content so hard that most SaaS blogs became unreadable. Thought leadership has mostly moved to LinkedIn.

Where does that leave us? Is it worth creating long form content for your own site anymore?

Yes, and here’s why.

1 - Content keeps the storytelling muscle strong.

Creating content forces you to keep your storytelling muscle strong.

I believe that SaaS marketing teams should be doing this constantly to make sure they understand their own positioning and messaging, then using it to make sure their potential customers do too. The internal clarity is vital to a strong marketing org. The more you do it, the better you become.

I still believe that you should create a long-form version for your blog first, then repurpose for other platforms. I understand there’s an argument to skip straight to LinkedIn, but I’m just not sold. Any feed is analogous to a river. You see something, float by, and then it’s gone.

If you are going to create content at all, I believe that your site should be the primary destination if for no other reason than it forces the people creating it to think outside of the algorithms. Free of the constraints of the feed, you may find that you and your team have a lot more to say.

2 - Content is a signal of legitimacy.

As Eric mentioned on a recent podcast episode, having a full slate of content can make your company feel bigger and more established than it actually is.

Whether or not people actually read your blog, look at your case studies or listen to your podcast isn’t exactly the point. It's more that you want them to have the impression that you are a certain type of company serving a certain type of customer. (By the way, this has always been true. AI just makes it easier to do.)

This is especially true for companies selling to the enterprise. Your product may be excellent, but you cannot have a hacked-together marketing presence for long. You want your prospects to feel comfortable that your business is as legit as they are, so that they can make the commitment required to adopt your product.

In reflecting on this, I realized that I’ve developed strong impressions of many companies without ever actually reading their content. Clay is a good example. I heard about the product and later checked the site and noticed a few things about it without actually clicking into any content:

• The case studies showed some really impressive logos.
• There was a blog post with the title “Clay reaches $100m ARR.” Dang, bigger than I thought.
• There was another post called “How Clay uses Clay” which piqued my interest because I think unlocking internal expertise makes for great content.
• There is a ton of content, which implied they been at this for a while

I'm sure there would be far more value if I actually clicked and read these things, but Clay achieved something important without that as well. Eric's point really drove something home for me that content is as much about the theater as it is about the quality, the traffic and the conversions.

It can serve many purposes for a business, even when no one reads.

3 - Content still fuels discovery.

Content still influences discovery, both in traditional search and increasingly in LLMs. I know I'm a small sample size of just one person, but I still search a ton. And I know that B2B content is significantly influencing what I find in those searches. That is hugely important.

Consider that you might create content that influences the results of a search in Perplexity. A searcher may skim an AI summary of a post and never realize your content was the source of that information. That may feel frustrating, but only if you are looking at content through the “blog era” lens. The more optimistic view is that your content influences LLMs which influence people. You still have some control. It's not as direct as it once was, but it's still potentially very valuable.

The new content outlook

To be honest, I am still struggling a bit with this new reality. I like the way things were, and I'm frustrated that the work that I do has gotten more complicated than it used to be. I miss reading blogs, and I miss the days when people shared ideas and experiments in long form. I’m tired of feeds.

But I am working on a new outlook for myself and I think there are some things here that others may find useful too:

• Idea distribution > content distribution. It's hard to distribute content because no platforms incentivize external links. But you do have the opportunity to distribute ideas, and those ideas can be closely aligned with your company's values and mission. The emphasis on ideas over content, I think, can help marketing teams clarify their positioning, messaging, and vision. And I think this is a great thing.
• Content is still the best option. Something I ask myself occasionally is, “If not content, then what?” The ideal scenario is that the product has growth loops built in, and that customers love it and want to keep using it, recommending it, and inviting people. Beyond that, content is the next best way to reach people, even if it does look different than it did a few years ago. I think most marketing teams should have a pretty well-rounded approach that includes long-form content, video, maybe audio and a sprinkling of performance advertising and influencer marketing.
• It’s actually easier to stand out. As the old content playbook deteriorates, it opens the door for experimentation. Because you aren't on the hook for 20 SEO posts per month, you may have some room to do something cool or weird, or maybe even so authentic or vulnerable that it didn't have a place in the old playbook. There are new opportunities popping up all over the place.
• Content is the fuel. I love this idea from MKT1: “The fuel is all the stuff that you say (out loud, in writing, or visually) to your audience—whether that be short-form copy on a website, a long-form blog post, an image in an ad, or an explainer video. The engine is all of the channels and processes you use to get the fuel out to your audience, plus the tools you use and the metrics you use to track your marketing and growth efforts. When you combine the fuel and the engine, your business grows fast.”

We are playing a new version of the same game right now. For people like me (and I know I’m not alone), we have to take a hard look at our instincts and gut-check them. Every time I do this, I learn something new. What if we don't do content at all? What if I pour a lot of energy into a piece and it gets 10 page views? What if we are too late to go hard on [insert channel here]? What if I can't attribute a new customer to a LinkedIn post from 6 months ago?

This is the new world and I want to explicitly state that it’s not bad, it’s just different. The deeper I go, the more I like it because I keep finding new opportunities.

Will anyone read it? Maybe and maybe not. But that might not matter.