The Single Reason There’s No Such Thing As One Perfect Blog

It doesn’t matter what resource, strategy, project, organisation or industry we look at, everyone’s continually striving to achieve perfection.

Right from when we’re at school, we’re taught that perfection is best.  Perfect is something we must always try to be and if we manage to reach perfection, we’ll see a whole host of benefits.

The problem is that as we grow up and get involved in business, whilst perfection isn’t any less beneficial, it’s sometimes impossible to achieve.

This is a very similar situation to the one that those people trying to directly replicate a perfect blog are in – it’s an impossible feat.

At The Blogshop, we develop and deliver business blogging strategies for clients in a wide variety of different industries.  Whilst each strategy has the same, basic foundations in place, the actual specifics and intricacies of the strategy vary massively.

Although this is, in the first instance, due to the organisation’s requirements and their expectations from blogging, it all ultimately comes down to the fact that the organisations are trying to satisfy their audiences and every audience is different.  Often considerably so.

What’s more, audiences can differ hugely for organisations within the same industry, even if it’s particularly niche.

Take two baby product retailers as an example.  Both selling very similar items and targeting audiences with almost the exact same demographics, if one is reaching out to parents in the south and the other parents in the north, this slight difference could be all it takes to mean a completely different focus is needed.

Applying to the layout as much as the content, what works for one audience won’t necessarily work for another, no matter how successful it has been.  Using Mindjet’s Conspi.re blog as an example, it won our ‘Best Blog Design’ award in 2012 and there’s little doubt that it’s a fantastically designed blog that works well when it comes to reader-engagement.

But as great as it is, it’s unlikely to work in its exact state for a business such as a small clothing retailer.  The layout is too formal, the whole experience is very professional and the approach to the content is too business-like for a small business retailer.  The basics could work as they stand, but the rest would need tweaking to ensure success elsewhere.

Every single organisation out there can benefit from business blogging.  No exceptions.

For those already blogging, you’ll find some organisations are blogging OK, some need help and some are doing it so well that it appears they’ve got a perfect blogging strategy in place – and chances are, they have.

But as soon as you try to mimic their success like-for-like for another audience, at best you’re going to see fewer benefits and at worst it’s going to be a complete flop.  And that’s purely for the fact that every single blogging strategy out there needs to be developed and implemented for a specific audience, as only then can you be on the path to perfection.

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