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I think of myself as a writer. I started blogging fairly regularly in high school on LiveJournal, or one of those sites. Through the years, I’ve attempted to keep up with my blogging, using sites like Blogger, Salon.com, WordPress—even designing my own web site on iWeb. You name the platform, I’ve pretty much tried them all!
Each time, I design a pretty new blog and swear to myself that I’ll write something, anything, in my blog every single day. Then, of course, life happens. Work, responsibilities, having a social life all get in the way and my blog falls by the wayside. Now, in my case, no one really gets disappointed. Except of course for my mother, and the one reader I have somewhere in Iowa.
Now, I’m just one person. But if you’re running a business, following my inconsistent content model can spell disaster. Joe Pulizzi wrote an interesting post on Junta42’s content marketing blog last week that addressed a topic you don’t often see on the blog of a content marketing agency: 7 Reasons NOT to do Content Marketing. A lot of the reasons had to do with consistency. If you’re going to start producing content, you need to be committed to providing fresh, informative content on a regular basis, otherwise you look worse than you would if you never started. Furthermore, your content needs to original, relevant, and customer-focused (so stop talking about yourself so much, will you?).
Before you write one word, you need to know what the end goal of your content marketing effort is. Do you want to increase traffic? Improve conversion? Inform? All of the above? Tailor your strategy—you have a strategy, right?—to fit this end goal. And make sure everyone involved, even at the highest levels, is involved in the process and knows exactly how and why you are producing your content.
Maybe I should follow this advice for my personal blog. I wouldn’t want to disappoint mom.
Image from christthetruth.files.wordpress.com
Tags: blog, content marketing
