Connected Copywriting

You may notice that I don’t post here very often.

That means I don’t practice what I preach when it comes to blogging. Updating a blog shows you care and causes people to check back more often, increasing loyalty, brand awareness, and knowledge of your services or products. Maintaining a blog is also a way to update your website and keep it current, meaning that search engines may crawl it more often.

So why don’t I blog more frequently?

It’s not because I don’t care. On the contrary, it’s because I care too much. I’m usually too busy with actual client copywriting to make blogging a priority. I’d rather focus on the work itself, and so far, I haven’t needed to increase my blog posting for marketing purposes.

Of course, this is the same argument I might get from a client about why she shouldn’t blog. And it’s true that a two-entry blog that never gets updated won’t do much good at all, and might even backfire, making it look like you don’t follow through. However, there’s a big difference between a blog that’s been abandoned without a plan and one that’s just not updated often. It’s better to have a few quality posts that actually say something rather than frenetically posting about nothing every day just for the sake of posting.

If I’m really honest, it’s also partly because I’m limelight-shy. I like to be behind the scenes.  I engage in other blog sins too, like not having comments open and not having a blog roll. Basically, I violate every blogging tenet out there. If the point is to build community, I’m failing miserably—on purpose.

So why do I blog at all? Why not just keep quiet?

Building a community is not the only reason to have a blog. I like to keep the site at least somewhat current and make it clear that I’m still taking clients. Plus, I like to educate site visitors about website copywriting and get up on my grammar soapbox from time to time. The blog provides a way for me to do those things. For common questions, I can simply point people to a relevant post.  Furthermore, every post has the potential to demonstrate the beauty of the long tail, getting me visitors from specific or unusual search queries.

And who knows—maybe someday I’ll get more serious about the blog for its own sake, or I’ll decide I need to ramp up my marketing efforts. At that point, it will have been around for a while and have at least a few posts built up, which never hurts.

In other words, I blog now so that I have a better foundation for blogging in the future.