The case for blogs

Indiscriminate posting isn’t all bad.

  • Publishing anything at all is better than publishing nothing.
  • Blogs are frictionless. They don’t demand structure and planning. That helps grease the content wheels. It is an enabler to being helpful in regular doses.
  • A blog doesn’t offend anyone, it exposes your personality, often a good thing.
  • It is a fishing net, the river goes by, you catch new fish. We get that. But that fishing could be better for the fish.

The case against blogs

Website visits and website content benefit from structure and planning. Blogs don’t deliver.

New visitors don’t have context.

People who use search engines are on a mission. They don’t know you. They don’t care about you yet. They want more information on a topic. Blogs don’t deliver.

The ongoing navigation of blog is pants

Search audiences have a number of specific decisions to make.

The conversation is bigger than your post. People make lots of searches on the same topic. Unless the navigation is seamless and obvious, it won’t happen on your site – which is the ultimate objective. If the back button is easier than the next step, we’ve lost.

Don’t make people think.

Navigation without breaking concentration means making it easy.

Blog posts are like a stack of old newspapers. If you compare and imagine finding information from the stack of irrelevant articles against walking into an organised library of curated topics and shelves.

You can’t find meaningful content in a bunch of old blogs. We can do better than being illogically chronological.

Hubs have all related information organised in the same place. Casting your eye across the shelves is easier.

Who even are you?

Finding things in a bunch of emails is just as bad, come to think of it.

Your latest subscriber might get a completely different sense of who you are. Yesterday you were a learner sharing recent experience, vs tomorrow being a know it all expert who can’t explain simple concepts. Ahem.

Time changes everything. A planned user experience doesn’t.

Blog structure is content sprawl

Categories and Tags, Authors and Dates organise the same information in multiple ways. Actually, it’s not that organised. It’s often the same chronological layout.

It might well have got you more visitors, but they probably didn’t convert.

This is duplicate content, and yes, that might have helped in the past. But the internet is way more competitive. Think about the ‘lost’ user experience.

There are better ways for existing connections

To expect people to develop a relationship on a website blog makes no sense. Your contacts hang out on social networks. So what’s the point of nurturing them on a blog site you can’t get them to visit?

Social networks don’t send people to your site if they can help it. And once people become clients, they have no reason to go to a website without being prompted.

So why create a blog?

It is a place for communicating your learning, to an existing audience who already knows you.

Letting them know what changes are taking place. Highly personalised news for a different audience.,

  • The fact you know who it is for, and when, makes it better already.
  • It can ease the burden of planning and pushing out updates.
  • There is an excuse to ‘link internally’ (hey we still like the outcome of SEO)

You will still get to see more audiences in Search Console, you can publish first for your most important audiences, and reorganise later for new visitors.

You get to re-order your future record library and make it look like you meant to build it that way.

Put ‘new visitor’ website content somewhere else

Anything that is designed to generate new business from new search visitors is likely to be better inside the body of the site, next to related content, with menus, links and breadcrumbs.

In fact, even repeat visitors will likely hit the home page first. Ask visitors questions and help them navigate their conversation. It’s not your conversation. They started it.

Welcome new visitors purposefully.