Why Neglecting Your Blog is Like Neglecting Your Child
How to keep your blog thriving and successful.
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Your blog is like a baby.
Can you forget to feed her for a week?
Can you avoid giving her a bath when she wets herself?
Can you wait for her to stop crying while you watch your favorite movie?
Can you hope that she won’t get hurt even if you don’t keep an eye on her?
Can you check if she’s growing well even if you often leave her to herself?
That’s your blog, like a child.
After giving it life, you have to nurture it, follow it, and make sure it makes good friends.
You have to constantly keep an eye on it because it could become obsolete and useless.
It could even be ignored because here and there it is not updated with the latest trends and demands of search engines.
Or the world may forget about it because it’s not as cute as when it was a newborn.
Like children who grow up, blogs change and people stop cuddling them like when they are in the crib.
A blog is like a baby.
If you don’t feed it every day with nutritive and organic food (content) that makes it grow strong and healthy, simply having valuable content is not enough to capture the audience’s attention anymore.
If you don’t keep it clean and fragrant so that people are instantly attracted to it;
if you don’t take it to school every day where “it” can learn new things, and fresh ideas, and become open-minded;
if you don’t help it grow to become unique and special, and have “its” own perspective people agree with, and actually search after being provided boring and worthless content so far;
one day you will find yourself facing a sad, tired, useless “being” that no one looks at and with whom no one interacts because
- it has nothing more to say,
- people stop relying on it for advice,
- instead of becoming an authority in a specific field or in a set of topics, it developed only a heap of confused ideas about everything.
Last but not least: one essential technical tip.
The next thing you should really pay attention to is IA, which stands for Information Architecture.
How would you talk to an old guy with hearing impairments?
Instinctively you would approach one of his ears since you know where the sense of hearing is located.
Readers look at your blog the same way: searching the path to what they want to know.
That’s why your blog needs to have an intuitive Information Architecture, some standard features that everybody recognizes instantly for their meaning, their shape, and the terms being used which are already widely known, such as buttons, instructions, and the typical terms of the navigation menu.
Your blog has to show its content in the most logical, standard though yet creative way possible.
People don’t want to waste their time trying to find where the content they are looking for is located.
We scan the screen with our eyes and is even harder on mobile devices.
That’s why you “have” to dress your child in clothes suitable for his age and gender: so that he is immediately identified by the social group he belongs to.
I know, I know it’s both positive and negative, but this depends on the comment that the mind adds, not on the clothes or on people's critiques.
Because as W. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says:
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
5 last tips.
❤️ Love your blog.
✍🏼 Nourish it every day.
🧑 Write for your Buyer Persona.
🥧 Remember your goal: help people solve a specific Problem or set of problems, feed their Interests, and satisfy their Essentials. Always remember to bake the P.I.E.
🐧 Set your “Tone of Voice”, namely find a unique writing style able to convey your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Remember Happy Feet? Find your own inner song!
I write to bake the P.I.E., that is, I try to help people find unique solutions to problems in the most creative, unexpected, and effective way possible.
Shortly, I consider myself a digital marketing maverick.
How do I achieve this? Evoking the skills earned over the years leading a small business with employees, managing all business sectors, from accounting to business administration, from production to marketing and sales.
Follow me on my global blog www.marinobaccarini.com and if you read Dante’s idiom, follow my Italian blog www.marinobaccarini.it
