Is Blogging For You?

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Created on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 09:29

By Jens Thomsen, Impact Brussels

Blogging, blogging, blogging. Blogs are often considered the essence of social media, and over the last 10 years the number of blogs on the internet have grown explosively to the point where millions of private individuals and businesses have blogs where they share information and attempt to market their products and services.

Blogs are so common that today the sheer number of blogs makes it a lot more difficult to become a successful blogger than just a few years ago. Blogs are no longer exotic and they share the basic challenge of all other websites; that it is often very difficult to be found by the people you would like to reach out to.

Five years ago, or ten years ago, it was much easier to attract attention to your blog because blogs were still rare, new and interesting. People could find you when they searched for information on the internet. Today the internet is so crammed that you're lucky if your blog shows up in a search at all.

So why bother setting up and writing a blog for your business or organisation? Is it worth the time that you would have to devote to maintaining it?

First of all, very few bloggers manage to turn their blog into a business. Having a blog is not a business plan or a robust communications plan. A blog does not attract income it really is little more than a threaded discussion. However, a blog can be used to support your business or organisation, as part of your marketing activities or political advocacy.

Share useful information

The success of your blog, of any blog, depends on the quality of your writing and of the information you share. If you are able to present useful information on a well-written blog you may certainly still be able to attract readers among your target audience.

However, it is very important that your information is useful and that you only write about the area of activity of your business or organisation. It is also very important that you establish your blog in a manner that allows people to find you as easily as possible.

Do not write about private stuff on your blog. Your readers don't want to know what you had for dinner and social media platforms are full of that kind of non-information. On the other hand, if your information is useful or helpful to your audience your writing does not have to be art. Useful information is much more effective at attracting readers than elegant writing that is merely trying to entertain.

Don't expect wonders

You may take a more pragmatic approach to blogging. I have a blog on my website, but in reality I don't blog. I write newsletter articles and recycle these on my blog. This way I have a blog with information about communications practices in small and midsize companies and organisations on my website. No matter what you do or how smart you are it will take some time before your blog begins to get noticed. Count on several months.

You can use social media to create some attention about your blog by announcing new blog posts on your social media platforms, but don't expect people to rush to your blog by the thousands. It's not going to happen unless you are a rock star. It probably will not even happen if you have extremely interesting and useful information to share.