Someone recently asked me if I thought it was a good idea, for them to start writing a business blog. Whilst you may imagine my answer would automatically be a resounding ‘yes’, it wasn’t!
I explained that in my experience, blogging is only a worthwhile commercial investment if you invest in it appropriately for what you want to achieve. For a blog to succeed, we need to start off by understanding the incredible volume of competition and noise out there.
Competition and noise
At the time of writing this, on WordPress.com alone there are over 50 million blogs with 500 thousand new posts published every day. That’s just on one version, of one blogging platform. There are many millions more blogs out there, like this one, which are self-hosted WordPress blogs. Then, there are over 100 million more people blogging across platforms like; Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad and Posterous etc.
To attempt to cut through all that blogging activity and the billions of pages of content out there, with a blog that even the blog’s owner isn’t committed to, is unrealistic at best.
The opportunity
Thankfully, there is an amazing opportunity if you are prepared to invest the time, energy, creativity and money (yes money) required, in order to build a commercially valuable blog.
We need to start though, with a commitment to take blogging seriously and invest in it, as we would with any business opportunity. Anything else is a waste of time.