Success defined by your goals, not someone elses
July 20th, 2006The topic of blogging is not something I spend a lot of time writing about; there are plenty of others that do that a lot better than I could.
Today I read a post by Eric Kintz, Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP that talked about something that has puzzled me for a while. The idea that to be successful in blogging you have to post every day. He doesn’t think so, and I agree.
At the heart of it is really what you define as “being successful”. For some bloggers it is to drive as many people to their website as possible so they can make money with advertising. That’s irrelevant to blogs like mine because I don’t advertise and never will.
This blog is about sharing ideas with people with similar interests who in the process either teach me something, or learn something. I believe that it will build relationships that I couldn’t build otherwise. Simple as that.
His post is insightful; I know I can only read a limited number of posts each day. I run out of time. The greater the number of media sources, bloggers, podcasts, video casts, the more selective I will need to be in what I read, hear, watch etc.
So I probably stick with the ones that give me one great insight a week, rather than five bits of fluff a day. Here is one of his ten reasons why post frequency doesn’t matter:
5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere –
My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right:frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example,not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger
in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack.
It raises another point that relates directly to marketing; setting goals. The strength of Eric’s insight is that it links being successful with what you set as your goals.
How often do marketing efforts fail because of unclear, poorly defined goals? How often do companies spend a small fortune on a particular type of media (say radio advertising) because the salesman could show it worked for other companies? (who had different target markets, offers, products, services etc)
I like his thinking.
July 23rd, 2006 at 12:45 am
Nice follow up, David. The idea of this post came from a blogger criticizing me for not posting every day. But why did it matter since I have no intent of being a Technorati 100? I would rather reach 10 of our best customers, 10 analysts and 10 top marketing bloggers. They will actually do a far better job of spreading my thoughts than I would by posting frequently.
Eric
July 23rd, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Thanks Eric. It’s all about horses for courses; my objectives are similar to yours. The challenge for now is that many of the people we hope to reach simply have not made using RSS feeds a part of their communications habits.
In the meantime, I still have thought provoking conversations with like minded people from around the globe.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Hi Davd,
Just followed your link from Jim Boykins blog and thought I’d say G’day. Good to see another SEO from Oz. How long have you been doing seo and what’s you favourite market?
Cheers,
Ben Wilks
Australian SEO Consultant