Bad Advice Time: Write Blog Posts and Readers Will Come

All the rage right now is content marketing. That is certainly no secret. What is interesting is that almost all of the advice out there about content marketing focuses simply on writing. “Write epic content,” they say. The question that remains unanswered, of course, is how you can be assured that anyone will actually see that epic content. Even beyond that, there is the question of whether any potential or existing customers will actually see that epic content. You’ve heard the deeply philosophical question about whether a tree falling makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. One can ask a similar question about content. If no one is reading, does it really matter what you write?

About ten years ago or so when Blogger and Livejournal were still fairly new, you could actually start to blog and pick up readers along the way, even without promotional tools like Twitter and Facebook. If you posted consistently and attracted people who started to comment regularly, your blog could actually gain popularity and become a pretty popular destination site. As is so often the case, however, sometimes times change.

These days, there are countless blog sites online. Some belong to individuals, some belong to companies, and some belong to groups of individuals. Many of these blogs are sending out very similar kinds of content, especially in the marketing sector. In fact, many blogs in the marketing sector are focused on nothing apart from blogging and content marketing. It’s almost like the movie Inception – a blog about blogs about blogging! Bloggers have become adept at using link baiting and comment baiting to drive traffic and other bloggers have been around long enough to know how to use Search Engine Optimization to make their blog show up well in organic search results.

Not only are there many blog sites out there, there are now seeming infinite ways to interact with a blog post. You can comment on the post, share the post to Facebook, pin the post to Pinterest, “Stumble” the post on StumbleUpon, and more. This means that if people are already following blogs regularly, which they probably are, their time is probably being spent trying to share what they are already reading.

In short, the fact that you are writing fresh content is great and will undoubtedly help your company at the very least, but there is no assurance that your posts will be read right out of the gate.

Don’t get us wrong. We still think blogging can be highly beneficial for many companies (heck, you’re on our blog site as we speak). However, it’s time to set more realistic expectations. Simply writing posts is not going to be enough. There needs to be a strategy to help drive traffic to those posts. Don’t limit your thinking to social media promotion, especially if your company has not started social media marketing yet. You can promote your blog posts by adding links to them in your email signatures, or example. Your homepage can highlight your new blog posts. If you send out an e-newsletter, you can drive traffic that way. However you go about it, there should be a plan in place before that first blog post goes live.

In the movie Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella is told that if he builds a baseball field the players and the fans will come. The miracle is that this actually happens. Your blog posts are definitely like a baseball field, but players and fans aren’t just going to show up. You need to get the word out, and you need to be smart about how you approach that task. Write epic content, but do so with a plan to get people to read it. After that, you can turn on the stadium lights and watch the line of traffic build.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmcgowan/2708700015 via Creative Commons