It’s a question that I get asked frequently during consultations with new clients: “Do I need a blog?” May answer for the majority of clients, was always “Yes.” As a writer, I may be a little biased, but I also knew the power of a good blog for both attracting traffic and interacting with site visitors. However, with so many new ways to accomplish those two goals online, I now pause for thought before making my recommendation.
So does this mean that the blog is dead? No. You only have to look at the continued success of information blogs to see that there is still a hunger for good content, but the key is that these blogs offer information, not products. They are businesses in their own right, rather than part of a marketing strategy to promote something else.
What it all comes down to, as usual, is money. It may take several hours each week to maintain a quality blog that serves it’s purpose, and just a few minutes to promote products or share news on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
So unless a business has a lot of useful information that they want to share, or unlimited time and funds, they may be better focussing their efforts in areas outside the blogosphere.
Useful, NEW information, I might add. Is it just me, or do so many blogs (I’ll focus on writers’ blogs since I mostly read those) say the same thing repeatedly. So I would add that no, a business does not need a blog unless it has new, fresh, relevant information which readers can’t find elsewhere.
Well said, Nichole. I find that this is a growing problem, and comes largely from the fact that Google currently seems to give more weight to blogs that are updated DAILY, forcing people who are blogging as a business into a cycle of trying to come up with fresh new content every single day. I’m not sure the best way to counter that – I currently recommend that bloggers post daily until they reach the “tipping point” exposure where their success has a more self-perpetuating element, and isn’t so dependant on page rank or hardcore SEO, when they can scale back to three times a week and intersperse longer posts with shorter reviews, links or video/image posts.