More marketers are blogging.
In fact, 8% of marketers surveyed and featured on eMarketer recently said they were blogging for the first time within the past year. It’s great to see marketers getting into blogging. It’s something that many marketers have tried and quite a few have found success with blogging.
There was more to the study that was interesting to me, though. Marketers might be trying blogging, but many aren’t really succeeding and I’m trying to figure out what the reason is for the failure.
Marketers Intend to Blog
The trend shows the importance others see in blogging, but it also shows that while people intend to blog they often struggle to actually do it. The more interesting part of that study linked above is that 17% of marketers intend to blog within the next year.
This is what I see quite a bit. In fact, it’s the reason there is demand for something like Ghost Blog Writers. People – business owners, marketers and managers – see the success others are having with blogging and they want to get started. These folks intend to blog and they intend to do it on their own.
There is so much out there in the How to Blog world about writing for yourself and writing about your passion. The bloggers that blog about blogging (including me) have been telling you that it’s easy to blog. All you need to do is get started and things will fall into place. We tell you that you should be blogging on your own and you’re a fool if you don’t.
Well now I don’t think that’s true.
Blogging is not for everyone. The first reason is that blogging isn’t the highest initiative for every business or for every marketer. Every business model is different and just because others are blogging doesn’t mean that you need to blog.
The second reason is that not everybody can blog. I’m not saying that everyone can’t write a blog post. It’s easy to write a blog post. Well, maybe even that isn’t really that easy for some folks out there.
I see people try to blog. I see people intend to blog. I see blogs get one or two posts followed by a whole lot of nothing.
People don’t like to blog. There is research involved. There is formatting involved. There is failure involved. Blogging is hard and it’s really difficult to do consistently for a long period of time. I think that’s why the number of marketers that intend to blog is twice as high as the number that actually do blog. I’m sure the percent that still blog after a year is probably cut in half again.
If you’re one of the marketers that intends to blog in the next year give it a second thought. Make sure you are willing to have a plan in place for blogging. If you truly intend to do the writing on your own make sure you’re ready for that commitment. There are many blogs out there with a few posts and then nothing. Now they have an empty blog sitting out there with no updates for years.
That is not something you want.
If you think a blog will really help you business get more traffic, leads, and sales then figure out how you’re going to get the posts written. There are a few options and it’s better to explore those than to fool yourself into thinking you can do it all on your own.