Flabby In America And Why You Shouldn’t Start A Blog
In 1990 there was an article published in the New York Times called “Growing Up Flabby In America”. The post you’re now reading is a similar one, but it’s aimed at writers and bloggers on the internet.
Starting with me.
Bloggers (like me) are getting flabby.
I used to think blogging on your website was the way to grow an audience online. But I have since changed my tune.
I’ve come to the conclusion that you shouldn’t start a blog on your website. There are probably a few exceptions to this, but that’s not for this post.
Before I continue:
I’m not throwing shade at blogging. Far from it. I love blogging… That’s what this is.
But blogging as a form of writing online has evolved over the years. And bloggers as a whole are behind. I was behind for a long time.
In the beginning, a blog was a “weblog” — a kind of journaled log of the writer’s life on the internet (web). When I first started writing online, I wrote on a website called blogger back in 2004. I loved being able to simply write and express myself for the world to see. And then it was really exciting to see friends in my world paying attention too! I was simply a creative with a love for creating.
Not long after that, blogging became more and more popular for getting a lot of traffic to your website. Ranking for certain keywords in Google was incredibly easy. Whether you were a dot com business who survived the bubble, or you were a basement internet marketer who was savvy enough to put together funnels, you made money from easy search ranking.
I began blogging at my personal website back in 2010 when blogging on your website was still a great method. I was noticing traffic going up and I was hitting search engines for specific search terms.
Then came the surge of social media… In 2010 a little app that made it easy to share photos with your friends came on the scene. Instagram grew to over 80 million users and was acquired by Facebook for a cool 1B dollars — in just two years. 🙄
But as social technologies became more and more sophisticated so did search algorithms. Eventually, Google changed the way search bots were crawling the internet and how they ranked websites (Panda 2.0-apocalypse in 2011).
So many of us basement guys lost their shirts when they lost their rankings.
But those much-hated Google updates weren’t all bad. They were just about prioritizing quality, unique content—seeking to make the internet a better place. And ever since then it has continued to get smarter and smarter at knowing the difference between content that’s published to actually help someone versus what’s published to hack the rankings.
This means “blogging” is now back to writing. And writing for real.
So should you blog for your business at all?
Yes. But NOT from your website…
I fear we’ve gotten lazy as bloggers. Like those kids in the 80s who weren’t getting enough exercise. Not necessarily lazy in how we write, but lazy in how we think in terms of our strategy to reach more people with our words.
Those flabby blogging arms of yours need to get shaped up by getting raw feedback from your audience. You need to be where the people are. If you’re a writer who wants to make an impact, you need to get fit.
Or if you are a business that wants to use the power of writing to grow your company, you need to get good at using words that are effective.
Lord knows I’m not the best writer on the internet. I have a long way to go. But that’s precisely why I’m publishing content here on Medium now and not on my website anymore.
So What Should You Do With Your Current Website?
Let’s be honest. Your website is probably a ghost town — especially if you’re just getting started. Let your website be the funnel for your business and let social media be the platforms where you publish regular content.
From there you’ll send traffic to the funnel (website).
Keep your website simple. Keep it about who you help and how they can work with you. You’ll need a Tellus Engagement Funnel if you don’t have one yet (we build these for clients here at Tellus Media), but your website should be all about getting people to convert into your marketing funnel and go from readers to buyers.
You don’t need any more than seven pages on your website, and one of those pages should NOT be a blog.
Sadly more and more searches done on search engines are resulting in fewer clicks. A study back in 2019 showed that over half of all searches resulted in what’s called a Zero-Click search.
Sure there’s still a ton of volume on search engines, but most of that volume is going to companies and publications who pay SEO firms hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. You simply cannot compete with them if you’re trying to rank for the same keywords. More on that in a moment…
Three Steps To Losing The Flab
Let me end with some steps for you and why you should move your blog to something like Medium.
Step 1: You Need To Get Clarity On The “Who”
If you don’t have a clear picture of who you are writing for then you shouldn’t start a blog at all. If it’s for your own enjoyment then knock yourself out, but I believe most creatives have a God-given responsibility to create and publish content that improves people’s lives. Don’t keep it to yourself!
Yes, it should be fulfilling by itself to create content (and when you use RVP it becomes very fulfilling), but that content needs an audience in order to mean something. Even if only one person is helped, it’s a win! The size of the audience doesn’t matter. It just matters that you have one period.
But audiences are only gathered around a shared interest or commonality. To do that you need to know WHO will be the most helped by your expertise and the posts you publish.
Step 2: Go Where Your People Are
I’m willing to wager a lot of money that your specific tribe of people is on social media (can I get a resounding duh). So one of the reasons you should post on social media and not your website is because you’ll get better and quicker clarity on who your writing resonates with — which in turn helps you get clearer on the “who” (step 1).
This also makes you a better writer over time.
Your first priority needs to be getting “sticky message resonance”. To do that you need to gather readers, and this happens easiest on social media platforms where audiences already exist.
Go where your specific audience is most likely to be, and create your flagship content there. Then syndicate it to the platforms where other parts of your audience are also likely to be hanging out.
A long-form Medium post becomes an IG story or a Twitter thread for example. And for LinkedIn and Facebook, just copy and paste it, then reformat it if necessary. (I talked more about that here.)
And if you’re about to say, “But Nate! That’s duplicate content….” read on:
Step 3: Syndicate & Forget the SEO Game (For Now)
If you are wanting to write content for keyword search terms and optimize for search engines and hit the first page of Google in the next 30 days then you better adjust your expectations—or suddenly come into a great deal of wealth (and if the latter is the case please don’t waste it on what I’m about to say).
Trying to play the SEO game the same way the big boys do is foolish. That’s a losing strategy for small businesses that want to create content and build an audience. It will take you at least a year before you start seeing results from blogging on your website with SEO in mind, and that’s if you’ve got a killer SEO team.
If you’re doing that you’re competing with huge deep-pocketed companies. You will simply lose. (A lot of people in the affiliate marketing space will try this route — you know who you are).
The best thing to do for SEO is to just build an audience first, make some cash with that, and then ask yourself if you want to spend a huge portion of your marketing budget on an SEO agency or build a team of your own.
One small tip here would be to just blog on Medium (or whatever your platform of choice is) and point back to your website for backlinking juice. The domain authority on these sites is so much better than your own.
To sum up:
If you don’t have more than 1,000 engaged readers on an email list then you need to be actively gathering your people around your message on social media.
And you can use it not only as a writing outlet but as a social prospecting tool (if you’re a business that lives on getting new leads). More on this here.
Until you have those 1,000 true fans, you should create and publish content on social media to test your content, hone your writer’s voice, and begin to gather your audience. If you want to spread a message and write a book someday then this audience you’ve been fostering will be ready for it.
I talk a little more about this in my book Magnetic Micro-Books. It’s a strategy I call RVP Publishing and Prospecting. Pick it up here or below for less than a Venti Toasted Graham Latte.
To losing the flab,
Nate
