Blogging: little and often beats occasional and brilliant

I've written blogs all day today, which is either an excellent or a terrible position from which to write a blog about blogging – you decide.  But it's given me a useful reminder: the businesses that blog well aren't the ones with the best ideas, they're the ones who actually show up.

I've lost count of the number of clients who've told me they're ‘not really bloggers’. What they mean is they wrote three posts in 2019, ran out of steam, and have felt vaguely guilty about their neglected blog page ever since.  Sound familiar?

Perfection is the enemy here

Waiting for the perfect topic, the perfect time, or the perfect 1,500-word masterpiece is precisely why most business blogs go quiet.  Nobody's inbox is desperate for your magnum opus.  What readers actually want is something short, useful, and honest, delivered often enough that they start to expect it.

A 400-word post that answers one real question your customers keep asking will outperform a 2,000-word essay that nobody finishes, published once and never again.

Consistency beats brilliance

Search engines like fresh, regular content.  Readers like knowing you're still there.  And – this is the bit people forget – you get better at writing the more often you do it.  The first post is always the hardest.  By the twentieth, it's just Tuesday.

If a weekly post feels unrealistic, be honest with yourself and pick a rhythm you can actually keep.  Fortnightly and reliable beats weekly and abandoned by October.

Where the ideas actually come from

They're not hiding in some special ‘blog ideas’ vault.  They're in your inbox, in the questions your customers ask on calls, in the thing you explained for the third time this week and thought, ‘I should really write this down’.  Your blog doesn't need to be clever.  It needs to sound like you, and it needs to solve a small, real problem for the person reading it.

The bit nobody wants to hear

Blogging isn't a one-off task you tick off and forget.  It's a habit, like flossing or actually reading the terms and conditions.  The value isn't in any single post – it's in the body of work that builds up over months, quietly proving you know what you're talking about.

So if your blog's gathering dust, don't aim for brilliant.  Aim for done, and then aim for it again next fortnight.  That's really the whole trick.

Nobody says ‘sell me something’

I hate selling, mainly because I hate being sold at.  That doesn’t mean I don’t buy things, I definitely do, but I like to feel like I’m in the driving seat, not being driven to a destination I’m not sure I want to be at.

I know people who can sell ice to the Eskimos, but only once.  I’m not interested in single sales, it makes much more sense to have repeat sales, one ‘sale’ and then people keep buying.

That’s usually because they’ve done that thing all the networking groups talk about – know, like, trust.  It’s all about relationships.

It’s about telling people enough that they want to buy – and there’s the difference.

Back in the dark ages when I learned sales skills (selling hotel function facilities, then bottles of pop in two different roles, where I was sent on a sales course), I learned all about features and benefits.  I was told that you can’t just explain what the product is, but what it does AND how that benefits the customer.

I think today’s selling isn’t quite so structured.  Yes, there are still elements of all that, but strong businesses work because their customers like the person they’re dealing with and have built a relationship.  The supplier is someone they can call up and ask for help when the going gets tough and feels like a part of their team.

It’s not just “Here’s a product that will be £50 please!”

It’s more “What do you need the product to do?  OK, have you thought about product X – it does everything you need, and is a bit cheaper?”  or “You could save more time if you used X instead, even though it’s a bit more expensive, you’ll get that back in the first production run.”

In other words, it’s about the supplier understanding their customer well enough to make intelligent suggestions. 

When you’re meeting a potential customer, it’s important to get to know them as people as well as their needs as a customer.  Back in the hotel sales department we were forbidden to talk business with potential clients over lunch.  We had to find some common ground and get to know them, whether it was their love of sailing, golf addiction or their newest grandchild.  It’s not a bad strategy, the better you know your client, the more comfortable they will feel and the more likely that they will actually want to work with you.

Content marketing isn't a megaphone, it's a relationship

I once worked with a client who wanted every blog article and social media post to end with ‘buy now’.  Every. Single. One.  I explained that if I asked you to marry me on a first date, you'd run a mile — and yet that's exactly what a lot of businesses do with content marketing.

Content marketing is not advertising in disguise.  It's the slow, unglamorous work of showing up, being useful, and letting people get to know you before you ever ask them for anything.  Think of it as the world's longest first date, except you're allowed to bring biscuits (and I do bring biscuits to some of my clients!)

The problem with impatience

Most businesses give up on content marketing after about six weeks, because six weeks in, nobody's beating down the door.  That's not failure – that's just how trust works. You don't trust a stranger after two conversations, and neither does your audience.  They need to see you turn up, consistently, sharing value and saying useful things, before they'll believe you're worth their attention (let alone their money).

The businesses that do well at this are the ones who treat content like a long game rather than a lever they can pull for instant results.  They write the guide that actually answers the question, rather than teasing it and hiding the answer behind a form.  They share the thing that makes them look human, not just professional.  Over time, that adds up to something advertising can't buy: familiarity, and eventually, trust.

What good content marketing actually does

It answers questions before your prospects even ask a salesperson.  It demonstrates expertise without shouting "we're experts!" (nobody believes that one anyway).  And it gives people a reason to come back – which is the entire point, because most buying decisions don't happen on the first visit.

None of this means content marketing shouldn't work commercially.  It absolutely should.  But the commercial bit is the outcome of trust well-earned, not the opening line.

TIP: Get the habit of asking new enquiries where they’ve heard about you.

Where people go wrong

They confuse volume with strategy.  Churning out content for the sake of a content calendar, with no clear idea of who it's for or what it should make someone feel, is just noise with better formatting.  Before you write anything, it's worth asking: who is this actually for, and what do I want them to think, feel, or do next?

If you can answer that in a sentence, you're already ahead of most of the internet. 

So next time you're tempted to end a blog post with ‘buy now’ –  don't.  Say something useful instead.  The buying bit will follow, eventually, on its own terms.  It always does.