Business Blogging gets a bad rap
Despite blooming into a legitimate business with millions of daily readers and a successful revenue model, blogging is still viewed by many business owners as online journaling - a way to free write your thoughts on business operations or to try and sell something to your readers.
It’s a shame because the blog is probably the single most powerful platform a business owner has on their own website. A blog does three incredible things:
It humanizes and personifies the management of a company (yes you!)
It shares valuable information in an easy and fun to read format
It is instantly syndicated and spread to the web with a few quick clicks
A blog, when well written, is a direct connection between your company and your customers. It’s not advertising. It’s not web copy. It’s a casual message from you to them. Because of this, however, a lot of people think that it can be written like an email to an old college roommate.
The free writing approach to blogging is one of the reasons many businesses don’t take the format seriously. In some cases, writers even do this on purpose - going out of their way to craft a messy post to make it feel “authentic”.
Why Free Writing Doesn’t Work
Early in my career I freelanced for a marketing firm on the west coast that handled blogging for corporate clients. They managed between 75 and 100 blogs at a time and had at least a dozen writers on the payroll (in-house or freelance) to handle the workload. It was 2006 and the philosophy then was that people wanted blog posts to be fun and laid back. In the words of my PM at the time, they should be “like MySpace”.
It wasn’t fun to write. Worse yet, many of us couldn’t find the line between laid back and professional, and produced content that upset readers who were often loyal customers. The entire strategy was a disaster. I personally saw no fewer than a half dozen confused comments wondering who I was and what I was talking about.
It helped me realize something important about blogging - something that the business community has thankfully also realized as time passed. A blog as a platform is just as important as a press release or a magazine ad. The same meticulous care should go into the message as does your marketing copy. Yeah, it’s funnier and more laid back and often times a bit more direct, but it needs to have a purpose.
Today, when I write content for a blog, I spend even more time than I might on a traditional article planning it out because there is a greater chance I can draw in new readers with blog content. Random Google searches, someone clicking through the website or a new customer trying to get to know you can be drawn in by that first line and held there until the end if I craft it just right.
A blog post, despite the tone and format, should be at the core of your content marketing strategy. When it is, the results are incredible.
If you have any stories from a blogging experience please feel free to share with us in our comments below.
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