More People Are Blogging - Should You?

According to eMarketer, the number of bloggers and the personal reach of bloggers is expanding and is projected to continue growing over the next five years.

This seems like a perfect place to exhort you to start blogging and tell you that blogging is going to blow the doors off of your online store.

Instead, my advice to you is not to start blogging without a plan.

The signal to noise ratio in the blogosphere is crazy, and it’s only going to get crazier.  As a blog reader, it can be frustrating to find something worth reading on a given topic.  As a blogger, not having the reach that a more popular but lower quality blog does can be frustrating.  There may be posts that get no comments, and there may be days when you don’t get any traffic on your blog, regardless of what you put there.  It’s not likely, but it does happen.

So, if you are going to start blogging (and there are several good reasons why you should - make your store more search-engine friendly, increase interactions with your customers, promote special offers, etc.) have a strategy for how your blog is going to work.  Think about things like:

1. Schedule - Post every other day.  Post Tuesday and Thursday, or any combination of days, as long as you’re getting at least one post per week up on the site.  Establish a schedule and stick to it.  There may be days when you’re too busy to blog or you’re out of town or the ideas will just not come.  Knowing that you have a posting schedule in place is valuable for these times because you can store ideas and posts up against it.  If inspiration strikes you on Tuesday and you have a post due on Wednesday, either write the idea down and save it, or write the post and post-date it to Wednesday.

Regularity isn’t just good for you, it’s good for your readers.  Back in the days before the ’subscribe’ button was commonplace, knowing when posts went up was the best way to entice return traffic.  Regular pings to the search engines don’t hurt, either.

Collaborate - Invite guest posters to your blog.  Tap employees at your store that are interesting, that have writing skills, or that have a unique insight into your industry and let them talk.  If you’re the public face of your store, the public should be hearing from you, but you should also be using the authority you have to introduce new voices that can help to make you more visible.

Content - Another way to make readers come back is to give them ‘destination content’, things that they know they will be able to find at a certain day or time on your site.  Webcomics that stick to their posting schedule do this, as do sites that have a “______ of the Week” post.  How many of you go to the record store on Tuesday, the movies on Friday, or the comic shop on Wednesday?  These new content days are ingrained into our buying habits, and you can do the same thing with your readers’ browsing habits.

If you’re going to take the blogging plunge, don’t do it blindly, and especially don’t do it because everybody else is doing it.  Isolate what your area of expertise is and capitalize on that.  Chart out your store’s narrative and share it.  The common misconception about blogs is that they are, by nature, disorganized and unprofessional.  There certainly are blogs that fit that bill, but as the format really grows up and comes into its own (as it’s doing right now) it’s also becoming clear that it’s a new publishing format whose cloud-based nature doesn’t mean it can’t be worth reading.