In August, Innovative Editing published a post titled, “Why Blogging Won’t Make Your Business Instantly Boom.” The point wasn’t to tell you that you shouldn’t blog as a business owner or entrepreneur.
It was simply to say that you might want to think about it before you go all-in.
Business blogging isn’t the end-all and be-all of attracting profitable attention, you know. Nor is it a marketing genie or vending machine.
It’s a tool. And a tool is only as good as the material you have to work with and the effort you put into it. As such, it’s partially up to you and it’s partially up to forces outside your control.
At the risk of killing your entire drive to start or keep a blog, keep reading. I’m about to quote from my own.
And if you stick with me the whole way through… I’ll even admit something a little embarrassing on my end to make you feel better on yours.
The following bit is from the aforementioned post, and it concerns those forces you can’t do a darned thing about.
Here’s the bold and blunt reason why starting a business blog won’t make your company an instant success.
[The act of business blogging is] nothing new.
It used to be something new back before the 21st century hit and everyone had a computer and internet access. But now that it is what it is, there’s an enormous market to compete with, as described by Entrepreneur.
The referenced Entrepreneur article says there were “an estimated 175,000 new blogs and more than 1.6 million blog updates.” Every day.
Worse yet, that was back in 2007. Which means there’s a lot more blogs out there to compete with then there has ever been before.
But let’s say you’ve already started a business blog and it’s not doing well. What then? Isn’t it embarrassing to quit?
It might be a wee bit embarrassing, I’ll admit. I just cut a blog feature myself, with September being the first time in two years that I won’t be featuring an Author of the Month.
This was something I loved doing. But it wasn’t achieving the reach that both my blog and the featured authors were supposed to get. So it’s over. Done with.
No more.
Because do you know what’s even more embarrassing than figuring out you failed? That would be letting your pride prompt you to keep wasting your time.
As for telling existing readers that you tried something out and failed, you actually don’t have to tell them anything. Just stop blogging. Since it’s not a success, most people probably didn’t notice it in the first place.
Therefore, they won’t notice when it’s gone. And if they do, they’ll likely assume your business has taken off and you don’t have time to write anymore.
If you’re truly concerned about letting your readers down, however, write a final blog that thanks them for the support. While you do, feel free to corroborate the automatic assumption mentioned above. Say that you don’t have time to write the business blog anymore.
Because you don’t. You’ve got better, more profitable sources of engagement to explore.