Blogging: The Useful Post strategy!

I’ve heard a number of bloggers recently proclaim that they are not going to update their blog as regularly as before. A few well-known bloggers made the announcement and now, others have followed suit. Their reason or excuse? From now on, they say, they are only going to publish posts, which hit it out of the park – Home runs!

In other words: They will only publish posts when they know, in advance, the post will be a smash hit.

A word of warning before you do the same

Before more bloggers decide to follow this approach, I want to explain why this is a really bad move, if you want to grow a commercially successful blog. But first, I’d like to share what I believe is the more likely reason behind many of those Home Run Post announcements.

In my opinion, the announcements are unlikely to be driven by a sudden realization that most of their past work was mediocre, especially as many of these bloggers wrote consistently valuable content. Here’s what I see the announcements driven by in many cases:

• A change in the blogger’s circumstances.
• A drop in motivation.
• The realization that they are putting a lot of work in and getting too little back to maintain the time they were investing in their blogs. Those who publish posts several times a week or more and achieve all our blogging goals, wouldn’t suddenly, dramatically drop how often we publish, unless there was a serious problem.
• Or that they have hit a creative dip and are dry of ideas.

Home Run blog posts: A seriously flawed approach

The problem comes, when new bloggers are encouraged to adopt the same blogging strategy, wrongly thinking it’s the best way forward. There are a number of strong reasons, why the Home Run approach is toxic.

Perhaps the most serious problem with waiting for home runs, is that it encourages the perfectionist mindset. The perfectionist mindset is the enemy of creativity and productivity. In waiting for everything to be perfect before you hit publish, you will find your productivity tanks, because things are seldom perfect. The blogger who rarely publishes also finds it hard to remain relevant to his or her readers, making this a dangerous strategy to copy.

Another problem with this approach, is that it assumes the blogger knows in advance when a post will be a Home Run or not. As bloggers, we write as well as we can, but it’s our readers who judge how valuable the post is, not us. I’ve written thousands of posts and it’s seldom obvious, which posts the readers will value the most. I’ve written what I thought were amazing posts, which attracted little attention, and others that I thought were good posts, which were massively successful.

The thing is, most of my best posts would never have been written, had I decided to only publish posts that were guaranteed smash hits. For me, that’s enough of a reason in itself, to stop focusing on waiting for home runs.

Blogging and the Useful Post strategy

In my experience, the most successful bloggers are those who have the following, simple publishing guideline: The post must be useful.

It’s better to publish nothing, rather than publish a post, which you know has little value. When you think your readership (or a hefty subset of your readership) will find it useful, publish it. Shoot for useful.

Service providers like you and I, use Content Marketing as a way to attract the attention of prospective clients and position ourselves in their mind as an expert or authority in our field. We achieve this by regularly turning up, with useful information. Useful blog posts are valued more, shared more and they are more likely to inspire your readers (prospective clients) to see YOU as a valuable resource for their business.

Clever posts are fine, but useful posts will beat them every time. You see, it’s a win-win thing. The posts your readers find most useful, will go on to become home runs for you. That’s because you hit a home run every time you show up and make a positive impact in your marketplace!

The bottom line: The time to publish a blog post, is when you have something useful to share. That simple idea underpins every successful blog I know.

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