Nobody Wants to Read a Stupid Blog
When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.
In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.
Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.
Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.
Why a Blog?
When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.
A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.
What Do I Blog About?
My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.
My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments. If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.
Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.
How Can Blogs Help My Business?
While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.
The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.
If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.
Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines. Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.
Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.
And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.
Wow, Tony. I don’t know what to say. You have totally nailed it with this post. I hope it gains some legs. But perhaps most amazingly, you prompted me to publish a blog of my own about an issue which is a burr under my saddle. I think we all trend toward inanity once in a while. But your appeal to passion -” business being an extension of who you are” is dead on. Thanks.
Thanks Sonny. I had to apologize to my graphic designer friend for making her sound mean and ogreish. She clarified that didn’t see the need to post a blog as the front page of a site where she was looking for peace and serenity. (I guess my blog is getting way too cluttered looking now, so I see her point).
However, I did remind her that a blog CMS is still the easiest of the bunch, and you’re not locked into the newspaper style layout. You can always post the serenity on the front page with links to interior content. I wrote a follow-up post on my site called, “Blogs Suck, and Absolute Blogs Suck Absolutely.
Hi Tony,
Great post.
I hadn’t quite figured out that some blogs are just “stupid” and “navel gazing.” Now, you’ve given me some great fighting words. Thanks for all the time and care you all put into your blog…which is always chock full of good information and not stupid.
You clarified how blogs can be used well for business. I believe that stupid blogs can harm business more than having no blog. You have made a good case for how to make a blog work for business, and how to get help doing so. In the past 5 days I have advised 5 people on start ups. I have told each of them, in a new practice of mine, to write what I call the “Source Document” before they write the business plan. You pointed to the fact that wellness is “who she is” more than “how she attracts clients.” The Source Document captures who she is; the marketing plan captures how she attracts clients. This source document is the center of the idea creation engine that feeds this woman’s business. Your post here tells me that for some posting their source document as a blog could itself drive business. For others, keeping it private may drive more business. The way of social networking is to make more information available than less, and I could see more source documents becoming available as blogs.
@ Lisa: Thanks for your kind words, and for catching my spelling on “navel”… come to think of it, “naval gazing” would be an exciting pastime, what with all those boats! When I was on vacation in Sechelt, BC, I found it particularly fascinating to look out our beachfront picture window at the tugboats pulling freighters eight times their size.
@ Scott: I would assume the Source Document has a life of its own, molding and growing into shape as the business finds its niche. Had I written such a document for myself when embarked into business years ago, my focus would have been a lot different than it is now! Of course, I would probably be a lot more independent than I am now because of intense concentration at the start.
I don’t believe the Source needs to become the blog. However, there are probably elements from the Source that could trigger ideas to blog about. I consider this the business equivalent of developing an online persona. One doesn’t really post their personal details on the Internet for all the world to see, do they?
[...] might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several [...]
[...] of this post. A blog should be well-written, and well-managed. I wrote a post for Duo about how nobody wants to read a stupid blog. The concept is that your content should have meaning to you and to your audience, and put a [...]
Leave a Reply