I was delivering training last week to two fantastic women who were reasonably new to social media, but who were keen to learn and spent the day questioning and exploring. I love doing training sessions like that one because I absolutely love helping people to really understand what social media is all about and how it relates to them. But I also like the fact that it forces me to go back to basics with much of the material and question everything that I have been doing over the years.
For those of us who have been online for a while, it is easy to get complacent and to think you know exactly what you are doing.
But do you? Take a moment to think about your blog for instance…
- what was your purpose on the day you started? If you wrote it down (what? you didn’t write it down?) go back and look at it.
- what audience was it targeted at?
- what were you hoping to achieve with your blog?
Now – how closely aligned to your past goals is your blog as it stands today?
Things change of course. A blog shouldn’t be static. It should move and change as often as necessary. But sometimes as you are moving, things can become a bit blurry and the clear focus you had for your blog to start with.
If your blog was there to comment on latest news stories and break stories where you can, is it still doing that?
If your blog was to inspire people within your own industry, is it still doing that?
If your blog was to give people advice on a particular area, is it still doing that?
It can be difficult to maintain enthusiasm for a blog over months and years, especially as more and more blogs come online, many of them repeating the same kind of information over and over again. If you lose focus or you forget your raison d’être, that enthusiasm can be even harder to maintain. Believe me, I know this from experience.
So go back to the birth of your blog and try and decide whether your purpose is the same today as it was then. If it isn’t, then restate your goals and start afresh with the same blog. It will make it a lot easier to still be writing in another 5 years time if you do.
Thank you to ellajphillips for the image
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Tags: blog content, planning, purpose, Strategy
