New York Times reporter exageragating effort required for good blog
Marci Alboher followed her Times article today on the marketing value of blogs to consulting professionals with a blog post on her own Times' Shifting Careers blog.
Despite learning in writing the article that blogging works to reinforce your brand, communicate with clients or customers, identify yourself with a certain community, show your expertise, and get clients, Alboher felt she needed to warn professionals who may blog to achieve success that they may not want to.
...[A]s I know from first-hand experience, blogging is hard, and not every entrepreneur or small business is suited to it. For blogs to attract a regular readership and to be picked up by search engines, they need to be updated often and promoted. That means that the person doing the blogging for the company has to have a certain amount of time as well as commitment to the project and, of course, writing ability...... I also discovered a few small businesses that successfully used blogging as part of a focused marketing strategy, in some cases dedicating an employee (or team of employees) or outside contractors to create blogs that would generate significant traffic.
I let Marci know I liked her article, but that she is making too much out of the work required to maintain a good blog. An effective blog published by a professional services person so as to further enhance their reputation and grow their business can be done in much less than the time required for other marketing/networking efforts.
A Harvard Business School newsletter talked of one post a week for a business blog. I preach that with LexBlog's hundreds of lawyer clients who are blogging. I also tell them to try get their blog posts down to half hour or so. Many spend more time, but that's because they are enjoying the process and growing their network and business as a result of their blogging.
In addition, blogging is not supposed to be a 'Woe is me, what am I supposed to write to my blog.' The best professional services bloggers listen to targeted RSS feeds from particular blogs and news websites as well as keyword/key phrase searches from Google Blog Search. A good blog post comes from, 'Boy this is great stuff I just found in my feeds, I need to share it with my readers' - adding one's commentary of course.
Blogs are a conversation, not a publishing expedition. It's easier to talk socially than it is to publish.
And blogging knowing it's all about a conversation solves the problem of growing your blog's readership. By referencing what others are writing in their blogs and reporters are writing in online news stories, such bloggers and reporters take notice of your blog. They'll often subscribe to your niche focused blog and share with their readers something you blog about.
Not everyone is trying to be an A-list blogger like Guy Kawasaki, who Alboher quotes as saying ""If you're blogging and no one is reading you, are you really even blogging?" Guy may see 500 unique visitors a month as total failure. Not the case for a 30 year old lawyer whose 500 unique visitors after a month of blogging are members of the California biotech community she is looking to reach.
I've got skin in this blog game, but working with hundreds of wonderful law bloggers around the world I have rarely heard that this blogging is too hard or takes too much time.
Kevin:
You might also mention blogs like Littler Mendelson's Workplace Privacy blog (http://privacyblog.littler.com/).
It gets just one or two posts a month, but it attracts lots of readers (as best I can tell).
Good idea Mr. T to point out examples.
Another, among many, is the New Jersey Employment Law Blog. Posts less than once a week and Frank Steinberg tells me he generates multiple inquiries per week from their NJ Employment Law Blog. According to Alboher, he could not succeed.
Kevin wrote: "Blogs are a conversation, not a publishing expedition. It's easier to talk socially than it is to publish.
And blogging knowing it's all about a conversation solves the problem of growing your blog's readership. By referencing what others are writing in their blogs and reporters are writing in online news stories, such bloggers and reporters take notice of your blog. "
I don't buy the party line that blogs are conversations, although I am a big fan of blogging.
If you are looking for on line conversations, then forums are your best bet.
For lawyers, blogging should be an extension of their normal desire to write about complicated legal problems and reduce them to an intelligible solution -whether you blog once a day or once a week.
This daily writing could be designed to improve your legal writing, create leads, lead to new contacts or a variety of other goals.
But first and foremost, in my opinion, it should be about explanation.
You may not buy it Michael, but a lot of people far smarter than I do. And as a result, they are networking, communicating and reputation building faster than they could do by writing articles or being on a forum - whether message board or listserv. There's a reason the first book on business blogging, and perhaps the best received, is called 'Naked Conversations.'
If blogs were just an extension of writing, we wouldn't see the hockey stick growth we're seeing in blogging.
Hell, I published a ton of content online as a lawyer. Got some decent exposure, but not a fraction of that which blogging has brought me. Plus I am learning and meeting a ton of people. Blogs are indeed closer to a Rotary meeting than a website or an archived index of articles.
You are both right. How's that for a lawyer answer. If you want to achieve A list status and reach out to a large audience, the more posts the better, and one a day to be safe. But if you have a niche (like the biotech one you mention above) once a week really ought to do just fine. My advice would be to figure out in advance where you are going to fit and then prepare for it. I do think a ton of bloggers start out strong and then lose their heart and quit, but that is going to be true of anything and those who do so were, apparently, just not cut out for it. I also think it is important to enjoy it and it seems like all the really good bloggers do enjoy it.
If the blog is sufficiently "niche," you can definitely get by with less frequency. My Renewables Offshore blog is an example of that - I've never really even promoted it, but I have a few hundred subscribers to the feed because I'm the only person who covers that space. And perhaps because I post less frequently, people actually read it very carefully and will often quote my headlines when they meet me.
I have the China Law Blog in my RSS feed.
I enjoy reading it, but have never left a comment. I am interested in what the blog says about franchising and trade mark issues in China.
I agree with the observation that you should pick a topic that you enjoy talking about.
Thanks for all your comments guys. Dan may be right that's a little bit of both. Getting a larger audience may require more regular posting, but per my post today, a large audience is not needed to achieve blog success.
Must have content for a targeted audience can be produced by blogs like Carolyn's. It's like EF Hutton used to say, when these niche bloggers talk, people listen - no matter whether it's a post every couple days or a post every couple weeks.