Studio Note #50: The Internet Is a Graveyard of Abandoned Company Blogs.
Not updating your blog is worse than not having one.
The internet is a graveyard of abandoned company blogs.
You’ve seen them.
Welcome to Our New Website — January 2022
Five Tips for [Industry Thing] — March 2022
Meet Our Team — April 2022
and scene.
Somewhere along the way, somebody decided the company needed a blog. Maybe it was part of a new website. Maybe someone read that blogging was good for SEO. Maybe there was a meeting where the phrase “thought leadership” got thrown around a few too many times.
So they started one.
For about three weeks.
Then the actual work of running the business got in the way, the list of obvious topics dried up and the blog quietly became another forgotten page in the navigation.
Today, Studio Notes hits No. 50.
We didn’t start this with 50 ideas.
We definitely didn’t have two and a half months of posts mapped out on a content calendar.
We just started paying attention.
The funny thing is, once you do that, finding things to write about gets a lot easier.
A conversation with a client turns into a thought about how businesses make decisions. Something we’re working through on a website exposes a bigger problem with how companies communicate. We see a brand doing something exceptionally well. Or exceptionally badly. Someone gives us advice we disagree with. We make a mistake. We change our minds.
There’s usually something there.
That’s been the biggest lesson from writing 50 of these. We’ve never really had to manufacture “content” because the work keeps giving us things worth thinking about.
And maybe that’s where a lot of company blogs go wrong.
They start with the question:
What should we post about?
That’s a content question.
The better question might be:
What do we actually have something to say about?
Those are very different things.
One produces Five Tips for [Industry Thing].
The other produces a point of view.
And a point of view is a lot harder to run out of.
You don’t need 50 ideas before you start. You need one thing worth saying today and enough curiosity to notice the next one when it shows up.
Then you do it again.
Apparently, if you keep doing that long enough, you get to 50.
Go us?