Beware Blog Bog – Marcia Yudkin

I guess being from New England where there are Cranberry Bogs, Marcia has a thing or two to say about another variety of “bog”… the “Blog Bog”.

I understand her point. For most of us, blogs are “stream of consciousness journaling”… Twitter on steroids before there was Twitter.

With Blogger you can put “blocks” of links on the sidebar to summarize your key points and product offerings. You can adapt Word Press too using widgets or summarize what you’re about through the navigation bar. Or you can set up a static landing page to organize your offerings.

As Marcia suggests, unless we use these options, people can come to your blog and leave wondering “what the heck was this about?”

(And if you are just putting fluff and filler in your blog because you – rightly – are sick of “giving away” the proprietary information that people should be paying to learn, you might follow Marcia Yudkin’s lead and contain a “meat and potatoes, no-holds-barred blog inside your membership program!)

From Marcia Yudkin’s “The Marketing Minute”

The blog format, with its conversational tone and informal jottings, works well for attracting links from other bloggers and boosting search engine results. But in other respects it’s feeble and ineffectual.

The other day, someone requested I add his blog to my list of recommended resources, which hundreds of visitors to my site consult each week. “There is little decent, up-to-date how-to information on my topic,” he said.

I had a terrible time wading through his casual, day-by-day entries for either a summary or a starting point on his subject.

Much the same challenge reared its head when I considered a blog recommended by another consultant for inclusion in the bibliography of a book I’m revising.

Again, I couldn’t find my bearings and didn’t see self-contained, reader-friendly chunks of information comparable to articles, nor any truly helpful navigation.

“Nearly all the best stuff on the web now is in blogs,” replied the guy who contacted me.

Yes, that would be the Sheep Theory of effectiveness: If everyone does something, you should too. Not necessarily!