On taking a longer-than-planned hiatus

I wasn’t sure if I’d be coming back.

I took a planned leave from actively growing my business at the start of 2024, because I had some major projects to get done in my offline life. This part was 100% planned… and I thought that I’d be coming back to my business by the middle of 2024 at the latest.

Aaaannnd… here we are in the middle of 2025.

The best laid plans, right?

Yes, some of the stuff in my personal life took longer to settle than I’d originally planned. I thought I’d left a generous enough buffer, but in reality I needed probably a few months’ more buffer than I’d given myself.

But when it came time to come back? When the dust had settled and things in my personal life were back on a semi-normal rhythm?

I wasn’t sure what I was coming back to anymore.

On AI and SEO

AI seems to have substantially changed the face of organic search and SEO Social media is fractured and unreliable and even more of a gated/walled community than it ever was. A few years ago (!!), when I stepped away from Twitter, I genuinely thought it was going to be a temporary break. And that turned into a permanent choice, as there was no more Twitter to return to.

It felt demoralizing. I’d had such luck with SEO— it had kept my business going even on long times away from my business in the past. Despite my business going essentially dormant for 2024 and into 2025, I had a steady trickle of sales, all generated from SEO. SEO felt like a good, ethical way to generate sales. It felt sensible, useful, reasonable, kind. If I provided useful, optimized information for people, if I added to the signal, rather than the noise, of the internet, some of them would also find my courses useful, and choose to buy them. Simple, straightforward, win-win.

But AI-generated content has changed the game of SEO. Perhaps not forever, but for now. And the idea of competing with high-volume, machine-generated content in battling for SEO keywords just felt a bit dystopian, to be frank. So for a while I thought to myself, why bother? Why put time and effort into painstakingly creating hand-crafted, human-made content that no one will be able to find, when AI-created and robot-optimized generic text is being churned out at lightning speed and float to the top of the search algorithm through sheer volume?

Existential questions about solopreneurship

So I chose to stay away for a long while. I considered my options, and reflected, and pondered, and asked myself if I even still wanted to be a part of this world of online business.

I knew that my courses had been helpful to my students, and I was so grateful to be able to run this business, in this way, on these topics. And I knew that I had more courses I wanted to create, and more articles to write.

But would anyone be able to find me, in the online world of 2025?

Ultimately, I decided that if I stopped posting entirely… people definitely wouldn’t find me. And I definitely wouldn’t be able to share the ideas that were floating around own personal knowledge management system in various draft stages.

So I decided that, despite everything, I did want to come back, after all.

Practical considerations: moving from Wordpress back to Ghost

I also realized that part of what was holding me back was technology-based— and it wasn’t AI-related. I’d originally built my first blog for the business on Ghost, then switched to Wordpress to have more aesthetic control over the website. And it made sense for a time. But as Wordpress updates got more and more complicated, I found that I was spending more time wrestling with the technical back-end of my site instead of focusing on writing new content or creating new courses.

Plus, in the interim, Ghost had added design-related capacity, like header cards that would let me approximate a landing page. Not nearly so much design control as on Wordpress… but far fewer technical fussiness to manage on the back end.

I knew that I missed Ghost back when I started a separate blog, The Studio by Elizabeth Butler, on Ghost back when I was still using Wordpress for my main site. But the process of moving from Wordpress to Ghost took longer than I’d intended. Some of it was related to tweaking Ghost themes to suit my existing branding— but a lot of it was just dull, tedious work of cleaning up imported content and converting landing pages over to Ghost format and chasing down any broken links.

My plans for the rest of 2025

I feel like this year is going to look different than my other years in business. I have plans and ideas— but I’m not sure how feasible they’ll be in this current climate. I usually love making clear announcements about when my next course will ship. But for right now, I’m going to focus on building a rhythm of creating new content, both for blog posts and for developing new courses. And once I have a better sense of how sustainable those rhythms are, I’ll be better able to predict when my next course will be released.

Thank you to the lovely students and readers who have been with me since the beginning, and who are journeying with me on this strange, winding road of solopreneurship! I appreciate all of your support, and am so grateful for your presence.

The business mentors I’m looking to for guidance these days

I’ve been finding these calm, practical, sensible voices to be a balm in my inbox and in my podcast app these days: