Shaun Low

Developing quality content has become the primary driver of success for many online businesses that rely on SEO.  Investing the time and energy to author a blog has become an extremely popular tactic when it comes to implementing a content strategy, but often a newly created blog fails to have an overriding purpose. Many online marketers view blogs as a strategy instead of as a tool that has a much more significant purpose.

Josh Klein a guest author at ProBlogger.net suggests:

Thinking tactically – writing a one-off post, promoting yourself, optimizing for search, building links – is all well and good, but won’t matter in the end unless it moves you towards the right goal.

So the question then becomes what is the overriding purpose of your blog?  Josh has a number of excellent suggestions on what the end goal of many blogs might be.  I highly recommend reading his article and taking the time to think critically about your own blog if you have one or are thinking of starting one.

One of the things I see most often with new bloggers is that they cling to this idea that the quantity of blog posts is what is important in establishing a blog.  I tend to read a lot of blogs and I do a lot of writing but I do very little publishing.

I hold to the belief that every day there are only one or two really good articles / blog posts related to internet marketing and or SEO and more often than not I am not the first person to cover them for this blog or I fail to locate them, so many times a week or more goes by between my blog posts.

My posting isn’t sporadic because there isn’t news to write about, there is always news to write about, but the topics that interest me and the topics that I feel I can add some level of value to are few and far between which leads me to I choose not to publish posts just for the sake of publishing.

Josh Korr suggests that many media outlets and journalists, bloggers are included in that description, need to:

…practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

This concept seems to get over looked by new and or overzealous bloggers looking to implement blogging as an SEO tactic.  What this also means is that maybe some bloggers have selected the wrong SEO tactic.

If the majority of a bloggers posts are a brief, and I emphasize brief, rehashing of news that many other online outlets have already covered then how will this add value to the bloggers audience? Build audience share? Or generate back links?  What I am saying is that if you don’t have value to add then why expend the energy to blog when you could be doing something more productive with your time?

One of the authors from a Big Red Notebook tells us:

One of the most frustrating things about this business is the lack of solid data supporting various content-based strategies.  Some of us have a very good idea of what works, but we don’t always have the numbers to prove it.  Even when we do have numbers, the inherently subjective nature of relative content quality complicates even the best efforts to generate good data.  Additionally, the variable-rich marketing environment makes it very hard to put that much faith in the stats we have.

The truth of the matter is there isn’t one right answer for everyone as to which content strategy will work best for which business.  What I do know is that blogging like so many other forms of online marketing requires a level of commitment and focus that often just gets lost in the shuffle of how many posts did I make today?

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About The Author

Roderick Ioerger is a fulltime internet marketing consultant and strategist. Having started in 1999, Roderick has worked with many of today's major internet marketing agencies as well as having been an in house SEO with some of America's leading fortune 500 businesses. Roderick resides in ever-sunny Phoenix, AZ with his wife Jillian and their two dogs Snoopy and Grover. View Marketing Pilgrim posts

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under The Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.