Hi there. Dave back with you, as we continue this “Blogging Basics” series. A lot of what we’re talking about dovetails nicely with 12 Minute Marketing, the product we have launched.
Blogging Ain’t All Sunshine and Roses
Although they are overshadowed by the many benefits, the cons of blogging are still quite real, and have to be taken into account before you make your final decision on starting a blog or not. Here are a few things you might like to consider before taking the leap.
Blogging takes commitment.
You can build a website with only a few pages, and if you decide not to continue, you can simply let it be. A blog, on the other hand, attracts people who are interested in fresh information, with the result being that you will have to update it frequently.
If not, the long and short of it is you will begin to lose the interest of your readers, and the conversation on your blog will start dying down. NOT the goal!
Blogging takes some skills.
Not many mind you, but some. Blogging – or rather the platform – does have a short learning curve. While it is possible to create a free blog with just a few clicks, there are dangers attached to free services.
For instance, Blogger.com regularly deletes blogs by mistake, and simply fails to restore them when requested. If you are going to blog seriously, it will have to be on your own domain and your own hosting, and you will be wise to set-up WordPress.
There are are also a few plugins that you will need to install to have your new blog operating smoothly, for which you will have to ascertain the correct settings. So there is a small learning curve but I promise it’s not as painful as you think.
Blogging requires some marketing skills.
Promoting your blog takes constant time and effort – at least at the start. You are likely to find yourself leaving comments on other blogs, as well as connecting with other bloggers in order to exchange ideas and arrange for promotional opportunities.
It is not like a static website where you can just stop adding pages at any given time without suffering any ill effect. You need regular fresh content and you need to promote that content to insure the world actually sees it.
Blogging requires some geek-speak to really flourish.
Unless you have a good knowledge of CSS (cascading style sheets), or the ability to invest in a decent theme (template set), it is not possible to do much fine tuning on the appearance of your blog – not as easily as you would have been able to do with a static website anyway.
Additionally, you are also not able to give every page a different layout without having some knowledge of advanced plugins, and risking slowing your blog down (while loading a page for viewing) in the process. So some techie skills can come in handy to really help your blog thrive. (Or of course the ability to outsource the techie stuff!)
Blogging is ever-changing and evolving.
WordPress is being updated all the time; this version that we’re using is 3.2.1. Additionally, it is all open source; meaning that everything is done by volunteers working for free. As such, many of the available plugins are not updated regularly.
As a result, it happens from time to time that some plugins simply stop working correctly (or at all) after a major WordPress core update. This can be annoying on the small scale, extremely horrid if the plug-in happens to be an integral part of your blog’s functionality!
Blogging requires the ability to be social.
Finally, blogging requires you to be part of the blogosphere. If you don’t enjoy interacting with other people, and using social platforms to connect with as many people as possible, you are likely to achieve only mediocre results.
If this is the case, blogging is simply not for you and that’s OK. It just means you may need to consider an alternative model for your online business adventures, if that’s what your goals are.
Really though, at the end of the day the benefits to blogging far outweigh the hassles and more and more businesses and brands are beginning to sit up, take notice and jump on the bandwagon. The question now is what will you do?
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