The Bloggers without Glory and Fame are those bloggers that create blog content on a regular basis but never get any fame or a large number of subscribers.

They create content and post on regular times for their own purposes and goals.

Blog of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!

Truth and Right and Freedom, each a holy gem,
Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem.

Tho’ thy way be darkened, still in splendour drest,
As the star that trembles o’er the liquid West.

Throned amid the billows, throned inviolate,
Thou hast reigned victorious, thou has smiled at fate.

Blog of Hope and Glory, fortress of the Free,
How may we extol thee, praise thee, honour thee?

Hark, a mighty nation maketh glad reply;
Lo, our lips are thankful, lo, our hearts are high!

Hearts in hope uplifted, loyal lips that sing;
Strong in faith and freedom, we have crowned our King!

The Inglouriuos Bloggers are here to stay

Blog Post Reach

A successful blog post gets copied, re-tweeted, referred on Facebook or mentioned in Linkedin. The success is in the spreading to many more people as the reach is far further than your normal reach.

However the problem with these successful blog posts is that it reaches a large population, this large population is not necessarily your target market or is reaching people that are not ready to buy. Thus not immediate business.

Business or Branding

The only thing to aim for is the generation of awareness and increased branding.
Not only amongst the people who read the blog post initially, but also through the search engines that present the blog post high up in the rankings of searches.
The more reach and re-tweets, the higher the post will show up in searches which increases the brand awareness. The people interested in the subject of the blog post are likely to read this blog post, which brings awareness and increases the branding of your company or products.
Will it bring immediate business? Probably not.

Blog Post ROI

As with most social media marketing the initial investment (writing the blog post) will only have a return on investment after a long time. If you want fast results then avoid social media marketing.

Do you consider blogging still beneficial for your business?

Content is king ?

Long have we believed content is king.
But it isn’t.

One of the problems facing content marketing is to come up with interesting and different content which is a real challenge. There aren’t so much possibilities to have interesting content that draws in the masses or the target market. Much chance your content marketing is failing.

Entertaining content

However the most successful people in publishing or blogging aren’t so much into exposing unique and different content, but they are good in presenting the content in a very entertaining format or form. In most cases they are not innovative or disruptive as this would be too challenging for most content consumers or for most of their audience, but they have the skills to write, edit, draw or create content which is entertaining.

Not entertaining innovative or disruptive content:
One can find innovative or disruptive content in PhD theses but hardly anyone will ever read it as it is about the mere or hard facts without any form of entertainment.

Plain entertaining content
At the other side is the content of the gossip magazines that seem to be very entertaining as most people read them frequently, although there is nothing new, disruptive, innovative or special about it.

Content isn’t king but the entertaining presentation is. Hence marketers will have to be entertainers or will entertainers become marketers again – like P.T. Barnum?

Is your content entertaining ?

When real estate prices started to rise, blogging emerged from the underground of geeks.
When the valuation of real estate was at its’ highest, the interest for blogging was the highest too. This was probably due to the fact many were becoming rich thanks to the ever increasing housing prices. People seemed to have time to read blogs on the Internet (instead of working hard) as it was the new thing.

When the real estate prices started to decline people turned to shorter information: Twitter. As if they hadn’t the time anymore to read long blogs.

By now the situation has turned really ugly with many people ‘underwater’ (at least 11mio), probably resulting in people not even have the time to read a blog or to follow someone on Twitter as they need to work for a living.
Hence the decline of blogging ? Or has the new just wore off ?

Has blogging had its’ time? For sure real estate prices won’t grow anymore like they did before.

How about you and reading blogs ?

The hype times of blogging

A few years ago, when the blogging hype was raging, it was important to have your blog listed and rated high on Technorati. It was not granted to all blogs to feature on Technorati. It became an achievement to be listed and your blogs’ influence ranked. It was a privilege to be proud off.

There were even “Technorati Tags” for indexing your content and blog posts by Technorati.

The decline of interest in blogs

Now the interest has decreased dramatically (according to the Compete chart).

Is blogging or the interest in blogs on the decline ? as the same trend is visible for Alltop which is also an aggregation of all kinds of blogs – but less selective.

As the hype and the interest for blogging has declined significantly, is then the goal of blogging for marketing purposes still valid ?

Is your company still blogging ?

Do You Remember
When We Fell In Love
We Were Young
And Innocent Then
Do You Remember
How It All Began
It Just Seemed Like Heaven
So Why Did It End?
Remember The Time – Michael Jackson

The blogging hype: Blog until you drop

One blogging for business was cool.
At the height of the blogging hype bloggers and consultants advised to blog at least once a day – preferably several times a day. Just like the leading bloggers with thousands of subscribers did.
Moreover the search engines drove people to publish as much content as possible as this influenced the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking in searches for the blog or website. The more frequent and more quantity of content – the more importance was given by the search engines to the website.
The more content – the more focus on keywords for SEO.

Hence blog until your drop.

Frequent blogging issues

The 4 problems:
- Even the best bloggers aren’t capable to write interesting things or give interesting views and perspective on events happening in the world or an industry every day.
- People don’t have the time to read all the content produced
- The more content produced by one person the lower the quality
- Finding the good content amongst all of the content published becomes cumbersome

If professional bloggers aren’t capable of producing valuable content at a high frequency, how could non-professional bloggers like CEO’s or CTO’s be able to write at that speed ? They have a company to run in the first place and they don’t have so much interesting to tell.

Blogging after the hype

Now the blogging hype has passed by, we notice bloggers are publishing a blog post once a week. Some even indicate they want to produce a high quality content blog post only once a month.

Still the best is to produce interesting content every day, but as a sole blogger that isn’t possible. When a blog is written and edited by a group of people it is feasible to have posts every day or even have multiple posts a day. Still even for them maintaining quality content will remain a challenge.

Posting once a month and people will forget about you and your blog.
Once a week keeps people interesting but you have to make sure each of your blog posts stands out of the crowd.
Twice or 3 times a week allows you to overcome the problem of one lesser blog post each week. Besides it is hard to know upfront what will be a hit blog post and what will be a laggard or unappreciated. Hence two or tree blog posts a week eliminates the laggards.

Do you or your company still blog ?
How many blog posts a month ?
How many subscribers ?

Blogging for marketing: exhaustion

Even in B2B blogging has become an essential part of marketing (Content Marketing) as it generates interest and builds authority on the matters that relates to your potential customers.

However all good things come to an end and one day you will be running out of good or interesting subjects or matters that interests your target markets.

Social B2B websites for subjects

In order to know what your target groups interests sign-up for different discussion groups that relate to your target market groups on social B2B websites (like LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Viadeo) or forums (Small Business Forum, UK Business Forum.

Position yourself as an expert or authority

A few times a week you browse through the different discussion boards and look for interesting matters or subjects while adding content and input to discussions as these will also build your authority and reputation in the business.

This method allows you to be able to write your point of view or give your insight on business subjects that matters to your target market.

If you keep coming up with good subjects and your personal views on there matters, it is very likely you will become considered as an expert or authority in your business. This will eventually lead to more interest and leads generated by your blogging / content marketing.

Your customer has to balance the trust and the risk before making any purchase decision. Trusted sources can help in this decision process.

Peers
Still popular and will remain popular.
A positive review of advice from is peer is more valuable than 10 reviews from unknown sources.

Marketing can’t do much about peers besides branding. The better the brand awareness the more likely peers will tell about this brand.

The research institutes
The typical analyst firms and research organization like Gartner/Burton Group, IDG/Forrester research providing insight and information on market segments. The problem is their views are biased (more leaning towards US companies) and can be influenced by companies.
As these research results are not free to obtain their influence is rather limited to larger corporations having enough money to spend on these research reports.

In most cases this is beyond the reach of marketing as these analyst firms want to interview the CEO, COO or founder of the company.

Blogs
Decision makers and influencers will be searching for information before an during their purchase process. Blogs are free to read and easy accessible.
The more different blog write about or reference a certain product or solution, the more people will trust the solution.

In order to reach bloggers marketing needs to hire a PR agency in order to address them.

White papers
Companies can distribute their white papers on technical matters or case studies using syndication websites. In most cases these require registration for downloading the white paper. This registration is a constraint on the scale of distribution and if people register they will often use web mail addresses in order to remain incognito for avoiding spam and follow-up emails.

Marketing can organize or even write white papers on both technical matters and case studies with reference customers. The syndication is just a contract that needs to be paid.

Testimonials
Written or video testimonials are very convincing and trustworthy. Still people will be suspicious and investigate if the testimonial is not cheated (bribed).

Marketing can pursue and try to achieve these testimonials which will require patience and a lot of work, especially if the company is publicly traded. In the end the testimonial still needs to be interesting and entertaining.

The website
Your website can be a trusted source if the content is informative and isn’t intended as a sales pitch. By publishing valuable content on your website you will gain recognition and your company can become an authority on that matter.

During the entire journey of the buying process your content will be remembered or referenced if it was valuable.

In any case your website has a serious influencing role in the purchase process which can be positive or negative.

Marketing can create the content of the website. The only hurdle is getting found on the Internet.

Nurturing
When consumer get repeatedly the same message they will eventually start to believe it.
The same is true for the nurturing by email messages to businessmen.

Nurturing is completely under control of Marketing. The only problem is not being able to reach newly interested parties that are early in their buying cycle.

Communities
Even for products, solutions and markets in B2B communities exist on the Internet. Buyers will seek information or even ask questions on these community websites.

This is completely beyond the control of marketing – only damage control for limiting the damage is possible.

Failing corporate blogging for marketing: the products or the CEO

Most corporate blogs are about the new features of the products or the CEO writing about personal experiences and events.
Both are hardly interesting and will have little success getting traction and interest from current and potential customers as there is no added value in this type of content marketing. Who cares about the CEO of your supplier? For interesting blog you can find some guidelines here.

The idea behind corporate blogging is communicating with the audiences of a company for generating interest and leads.
Blogging could achieve this in an apparently less expensive way than advertising or using typical marketing channels like direct mailings or email marketing. “Apparently” meaning the hidden costs are greater than expected, although they are not necessarily out-of-pocket money. The costs involved with blogging are: the ideas, the concepts, the subjects, the time, the writing, the editing and the promotion of the blog.
This is an investment your company needs to make on a regular basis throughout the year and while hoping it grabs the attention of the targeted audience.

Blogging requires assets

Most corporate blogs are unimaginative failures as blogging requires several skills and abilities.
The ability and capability of someone in the company to:
- Generate new ideas and concepts related to the business
- Write and edit in a comprehensible way
- Explain in an understandable manner and interesting to read
- Entertain the audience

Not every company is gifted with a creative blogger in a company who is able to write a good read about matters that matter for their customer-audience.

The blog becomes an asset

In case the corporate blog in interesting, getting attention, regular readers and links
then the blog website and the content of the blog will become an asset for the company. This asset can last many years as people will visit the blog posts even years after being written and published by finding the posts through search engines and bookmarks. We have blog posts from years ago that still receive interested readers every day (not exactly our best posts).
As such the blog becomes an asset for the company created by the asset of having someone with the ability and the skills to write great, interesting and entertaining content that lasts. In most cases this is not the CEO which is probably the reason why most corporate blogs are not that interesting as the CEO wants to put his mark on the blog.

Do you have the ability and skills for creating the asset of a blog for your company or does your CEO thinks he can ?

Less social media content creation

Although people continue to sign-up to social networking sites, according to Forrester Research in their
Social Technographics Profile the creation of new content on social networking websites is decreasing.
Not only the number of people creating content has declined but also the amount of content as people are less active.
Same applies to commentators and critics: they are less active too.

The novelty has worn off.
Especially for the early adopters who were the most engaged for creating and commenting on blogs.

Demographics and social effects

A large part of the growth of social media has come from older demographics who might just not be that creative anymore or have less drive to have their say.
This study of José Matías del Pino shows on The Effects of Group Size and Topic that the larger a group grows:
- The overload of information becomes bigger
- Social common ground becomes lesser
leading to a lower participation and engagement of the individual members.
The larger the group the more coach potatoes ?

The social media content decline brings an opportunity

It is hard to create new content and even formulating a good and readable comment is hard to do: 90 percent of Twitter is created by 10 percent of the members (Havard Business) and as bots do rule a large part of the social media universe talking to bots is no the best conversation.

Moreover if people don’t see a benefit in creating free content the drive is gone.

Social media content creation is dying which brings an opportunity for entrepreneurs and marketers to create content that will find an listening and engaging audience.

All entrepreneurs and marketers will end up in entertainment as content marketers.