Not in the eco sense. In fact, I’m not really asking if your blog is sustainable at all but rather, can you sustain it?
I’ve been discussing blogs a lot recently on various forums and continually come across the same problem – people who have blogs but haven’t touched them in weeks or even months.
And it’s perfectly understandable. Business blogging is hard work.
“Blogging and social media are the marathons of the marketing world.”
Let’s assume at the very minimum that you want to produce 3 decent blog posts per week. If each takes just 20 minutes, that’ll be one hour. Fine.
Except it’s not one hour really, is it?
It may be one hour to actually write the post (if you’re quick) but it’s probably another hour thinking up what you’re going to say, and another few minutes finding lovely pics to go with them, and another few hours reading and commenting on other people’s blogs to start generating some traffic.
It could easily take 5 hours a week of various bits and pieces to start growing a blog. And still nothing very little happens for quite a while.
Some marketing is immediate – content marketing rarely is
Businesses are used to seeing immediate responses when it comes to marketing – adverts make the phone ring, so does direct mail. Blogging or any other type of content marketing isn’t like that. At least not at first.
So, before you start down the blogging route, it’s worthwhile asking yourself a few searching ’sustainability’ questions:
- What, exactly, do you want to accomplish?
- How much time are you really going to be able to spend on this?
- Where will the content come from – will you create it all yourself or do you have people who can, and will, help?
- What sort of time frame do you need to see results in? Weeks? (Don’t bother) Months? (Perhaps) Six months or more? (Now we’re talking)
- What will I do to promote my blog and my content?
Let me stress, blogging is good for business.
Even if it’s only to help educate your existing customers – blogging is one of the most flexible ways of using content to good effect.
But, a blog is just a tool. You need to put it to work.
Image: Paul Kelleher
