Ask Not For Whom The Blog Is Updated…
Since we started this blog, I’ve had a bit of a quandry. While a good portion of the work we do at Vario is with technology companies, we also do a fair amount of work with small businesses. The blog has done really been tremendous at bringing in traffic to our site, and many of our corporate customers site the blog as one of the reasons they contacted us.
But the small businesses…the blog may have many posts directed at small business, but in a way, on reading back over the past year, it seems to speak to my peers, other developers/designers/marketeers. So the question, who should I be writing for?
So I’ve come up with a bit of an idea. Rather than posting solely on marketing issues, I’m going to start including an occassional post about the local area. Perhaps a restaurant review, or a bit of history, or something on uniquely local stuff that will, I hope, bring in local residents, and with them a percentage of business owners and potential customers. I think it’ll be fun for all of us, and I won’t be dropping any of the normal topics that I cover.
The idea stems from post I did over the winter, one about a local Samaritan, which ended up drawing a lot of local traffic and comments. Apparently there’s a thirst for information about this area, as they found the blog via the search engines. On closer examination, I find there’s almost nothing in Google for the village I live in (Manchaug, MA).
Okay, here’s a question for the bloggers in the audience: who do you write for? Your customers? Your peers? Or is it perhaps your vanity? And while we’re at it, do you think there should be a mix of all three?
2 thoughts on “Ask Not For Whom The Blog Is Updated…”
All of the above. I started out writing about marketing issues trying to set a tone that would be interesting to marketers as well as non-marketers, viewing the blog as a thought leadership project. I still think that’s the main point – “hey, these folks are smart, let’s work with them,” to put it crudely – but I think it makes sense to humanize things as you are talking about. People don’t just like to work with smart folks; they like to work with people they feel some connection to. I think both Maureen and I have dropped all kinds of tidbits about ourselves into Opinionated Marketers, not really as any grand plan, but because it felt right.
Ulimately, “interesting” trumps all. If it’s chock full of info but dull, nobody wants to read it.