Many of the companies we work with at Crossman Communications have not, at the outset at least, jumped into the world of blogging and I think that’s because there’s a lot of mystery surrounding blogging and how to do it. I get it. You don’t want to waste valuable company time and resources on something that doesn’t seem to draw a straight line to revenue and, if you aren’t sure how to go about doing it to begin with, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

When I began blogging about five years ago I embraced the concept with a ton of enthusiasm and a great deal of hope. I’m a professional writer with decades of experience – writing is easy for me and it’s something I love to do. I felt I had lots to say about web writing and marketing and it’s fun for me to share. I am rarely shy. I have no end of ideas for what I could be writing about. So I embraced blogging confidently, and with something akin to religious zeal, and pumped out a weekly blog that was a lot of fun to create. My efforts delivered no results at all.

For six months.

I was puzzled and discouraged. How can all that writing not generate some results? Especially after six months of trying?!

And, actually, it probably was delivering some results from a search engine optimization perspective simply because I was consistently posting fresh content to my website, which is something for which the search engines will dole out Crawler Love. But in terms of providing my target market with information that positioned me well, it was an absolute fail. I had completely neglected to develop a persona for my copywriting at that point and I didn’t have an editorial schedule that laid out, in an organized fashion, the problems my ideal customers were dealing with and how I might help them solve them.

In other words, my writing had been all about me. What I wanted to write about. What I thought was important. What I was interested in exploring. Bring on the gong!

So here’s the takeaway for today:

If your blog is not generating any response at all, then maybe it’s time to consider who is at the heart of your writing. Your blog, like almost every other morsel of online content, is not always about you. It’s about your ideal customers and how you serve them. It can be highly informational – as long as it isn’t just another long list of blather about how great your company is. Nobody wants to read that. You want to provide information that might trigger in your ideal customers a niggling desire to either pick up the phone and give you a call or send you an email to start an exchange about how you can help them. If all you do is write about what you do and how you do it, nobody is going to think you are aware of a universe outside your front reception area, let alone that you care about your customers or could maybe even help them with the problems they are having.

Questions, comments or assistance? I invite you to contact me at susan@crossmancommunications.com and let’s see have a chat!