Blogging can serve your business goals in many ways. However, you must recognize first it is all about communication. Or a little more accurately, a conversation. It is not a place to post re-hashed marketing materials, or to overtly sell your product! OK, that is about content… there is one more important piece than even the content when it comes to blogging: consistency & communication. Blogging requires commitment to producing good content. Producing good content takes time. If you aren’t going to make the commitment to regularly posting to your blog–or having a staff member responsible for doing so–then don’t do it! Nothing looks worse than a blog on your web site with the last post being months ago! You don’t have to post daily, but if you really want to build something with it, I recommend that pace. It will get you in touch with your customers in the marketplace and get you feedback you may have never received through another channel. Weekly is probably the lowest post rate I would like to see for a business, and something in between is perfectly fine.
Now, saying this, I’m coming off a week of no posts… which brings me to my next point: blogs are about communication. Communication is a two-way street, you have to listen as much as you speak… or as the old saying goes, you have two ears and one mouth, so maybe you should listen twice as much as you speak. Translate that into blogging by getting out and visiting your peer blogs and others that are in your line of work or related and get into the conversation. There is plenty of business in this world for everyone to have their piece. And when it comes to blogging, I can bet most of the other bloggers out there are not your competitor down the street!
Another part of this is you need to tell your regular readers & subscribers what is happening in your business or personal life if it is going to interfere with your regular schedule. If you look back at my last post, you will find I put a short two-line note at the end warning that there might not be any posts for the next week as I was preparing to sell my home. People understand changes in what you do… when you tell them! (I am thankful for my faithful readers, and have amazingly increased my subscribers over the past week!) If you don’t, they will just go away not knowing what happened and feeling like they’ve been left out in the cold. I hate to say it, but that is the experience I’m having right now in trying to sell my house… and I haven’t even listed it yet! Have you ever lost a customer before they walked into your store? That’s what I’m experiencing now–from the customer’s point of view.
While I still have more work to do on the house… I’m going to try and get back to my daily posting schedule. Though it may be spotty… I warned you! 🙂