BizTech
Today’s super-connected society has created the perception that any business worth its salt should be blogging. We have marketers, thought leaders, and everyone in between constantly expounding the virtues of maintaining an archive of blog posts for the purposes of keeping customers informed, for increasing search engine rankings, for establishing the mark of expert opinion.
But blogging isn’t for everyone—and it certainly isn’t for every business.
You do not need to be a blogger. In fact, it’s perfectly okay not to blog.
There I said it. Before Google sends its secret police to de-list me from the planet’s index, let me explain myself.
Blogging is a difficult, arduous path full of dead-ends, bumps, and constant disappointments. It’s like trying to lose weight. You keep heaping on the effort—downing fruit smoothies and eating carrot sticks—only to be disappointed by your scale’s readings. That’s because losing weight is less about tactics (like eating carrot sticks) and more about strategy. And strategy takes time. Lots of it.
Strategic thinking is a level above tactical thinking, and in my experience, most people suck at strategy. Tactics are low-hanging fruit. We share tactics among each other all the time, whether it’s some new weight loss food or a new search engine optimization trick. But tactics only take you so far. They’re just tools to help you accomplish an overall strategy.
Most blogs fail big time because they have zero strategy. A strategy is a plan, an overarching guide that brings you to a desired set of outcomes. Strategies are wars, whereas tactics are battles.
Most successful organizations have some sort of business plan in place. This is their strategy. When it comes to blogging, the question becomes, “Does blogging fit into my business strategy? Can I use blogging as a tactic to achieve my goals?”
If you can’t realistically say yes to those questions, then you should step back and consider whether or not maintaining a company blog is really worth the effort. While blogging as a whole is a tactic of your business, blogging also needs its own strategy. A blog needs a solid direction, it needs to interface with your other business strategies and tactics, and it must fit in with the culture of your organization. Blogs without any of these characteristics are doomed to a meandering fate of useless posts that bring little to no value to the business and end up wasting time that could otherwise be spent on more valuable activities.
If you run a business or if you’re in the marketing or public relations department of an organization, you don’t have to blog. If it’s a struggle to fit blogging into the grand scheme of things, then don’t pursue it, especially if the outcome is a half-baked concoction.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stumbled across a company’s blog only to find disjointed content that is rarely updated. It makes the company look bad, and it makes me second guess whether or not I want to do business.
Later on, you can expect to hear my ideas on alternatives to blogging. Because while “content is king,” it’s not the blog that always has to be sitting on the throne.
Chris LeCompte is the owner of the web development services company KickPie.com and is the chief web developer of PotomacLocal.com.
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