I really don’t mean to beat up on the post I’m about to link to. However, after reading this guest post on Marco Saric’s blog titled Why You Need A Content Strategy For Your Blog and having it be the 4th article I’d come upon on the night on the same topic, I decided I’d had enough and had to write something on it.
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It’s not that the content I keep reading is bad. It’s that its, well, boring. Everyone pretty much keeps saying the same thing in the same way and the explanations seem to be the same and the output seems to be the same and there doesn’t seem to be any real passion or sense of any of it.
Yeah, I know, someone’s going to say “Hey, you wrote two posts on better blogging and probably touched upon the subject as well.” Okay, so I did; but there are some things I’m reading that I didn’t touch upon, or touched upon that I said in a much different way. Let’s look at some of these concepts.
1. The concept of blogging strategies; ugh! Every person who wrote about this said that you had to decide what your ultimate goal was for your blog and that you needed to think about it before you started.
I said think about what you want to write about before you start blogging because you want to make sure you’ll have a topic you can write on for a long time. In my mind, you’ve probable already thought about the reasons you want to have a blog; to show expertise, to make money, to communicate your thoughts, to rant, to pray, to be a jerk, etc.
Actually, I broke it into 3 concepts: what to write about; what’s your passion; niche or non-niche.
2. Publishing calendar; really? What is a publishing calendar anyway? It seems to depend on who you ask.
Some will say it’s a way of planning what types of posts you’re going to write and when you’re going to post them. Some will say that it’s a way of telling people what’s coming so they can look forward to the next post. Some people say it’s what’s necessary to make sure you keep writing and know what topic you want to address each time. They say you should have a schedule that goes out weekly, monthly, even yearly.
Posh! If you’re someone writing for yourself, I will say that I believe it’s important to be as consistent as you can with your posts so that if you find people that like to follow you, they get some kind of idea of what to expect from you. I’ve yet to meet the individual that can actually stick to some kind of schedule forever.
Heck, I’ve tried writing a post every single day and I find that every once in awhile I can’t do it; I might even be backing that up some. Yet I write about what I want to write about whenever I want to write about it.
I tend to believe it’s much more important to get content out on your topic, whatever it might be, than to have to back yourself into a publishing corner to try to force yourself to do something. You’ll get bored, your writing will be boring, and people reading will get bored and leave.
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3. Write good content, be precise, and always have a call to action; duh! When I wrote a post on high quality content, I stated that one of the problems with phrases like that was that very few people ever stated what it was supposed to be. Well, the same about good content and calls to action. I tried to address it in that post and on one of my Better Blogging posts, and yet while I was doing it I was thinking “do I really have to tell people what good content is?”
Call to action is something totally different, though. I tend to believe that not every post written has to have a call to action. Some internet marketers have exactly that in every post; how many people will continue to read something that’s selling to them every day?
However, writing thought provoking posts, or asking questions, is its own form of “call to action” writing, although its purpose wouldn’t fit a marketer. I like to think of a blog writer like my friend Charles, who used to write very entertaining posts that made us smile and laugh, but what couldn’t necessarily be categorized as “call to action” posts.
Is there such a thing as a blog content strategy? Yes and no.
For my finance blog, even post must be about finances in some fashion, otherwise it doesn’t get on there. But there’s no particular style for it; other than finance there’s no particular niche either. I sometimes have a post a day, and sometimes a post a week. So, it’s got a strategy of sorts, yet not a strategy that’s so finite that I’m compelled to try to make it more than it is.
Same with this blog. My only strategy is to keep new content on it; yup, that’s it. To a lesser degree that’s my strategy with my local blog; it’s not much of a strategy.
My business blog… well, I’ve been thinking about that one a lot lately, and I’m starting to realize that maybe the categories I’ve been using for all these years don’t always fit what I’m writing about. All posts are somewhat related to my business, but I’ve been wondering if I’m stifling myself by trying to fit within the categories I’ve established. If that’s the case then the strategy needs to be changed, but even so, it’s a fairly loose strategy. It has a goal of course, but that goal is more broad than what most people might think it should be.
So be it; I’ve stated a lot of stuff here so now it’s your turn. Hot air, boring, on point, what the hey? Your thoughts please (see, that’s “call to action lol).
