My guess is that if you’re reading this, you know about blogging. (If you want free ebook on the topic, it’s right here.) Although 80,000 new blogs get built every day, it’s likely that most of those don’t last very long—good thing, too. Faced with a semi-blank page, most people write stuff that is either boring, selfish, or indecipherable. Most bloggers quickly lose interest and their blogs wither away.
But if you give people a template, you’ll discover that they can thrive. Give them a hole to fill, and fill it they will.
Imagine creating a customer blog where every one of your supporters is invited to post a comment. Your post could be as simple as “Today we built a school in Sri Lanka. Comment below and let us know what you think of it.”
Yes, you can edit the comments on your blog, but no, you shouldn’t delete the negative ones. Get rid of the profanity, the anonymous heckling, and the juvenile, but if you’re going to give your users a megaphone, you need to let them use it. If you don’t, no one will bother reading.
The real power of blogs comes from the fact that they can be as specific as you like. It’s easy to imagine a blog about the quest to create a new pricing model for adopting dogs from your animal shelter, or to enable a discussion about a particularly contentious AJAX coding convention at your open-source software group. Most of these blogs will be ignored, but some (perhaps more than some) will gain a following and help spread the word about your work.
Obviously, in addition to allowing comments on your blog, the big win comes when fan club members build their own blogs (or when you convert bloggers into fan club members!). The tools are now available to do just that.
By Seth Godin
Seth is the author of more than seven books that have been bestsellers around the world. His books include Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. He was the founder of Yoyodyne, the Net’s first direct marketer, and was formerly VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! His new gig is called Squidoo.
But if you give people a template, you’ll discover that they can thrive. Give them a hole to fill, and fill it they will.
Imagine creating a customer blog where every one of your supporters is invited to post a comment. Your post could be as simple as “Today we built a school in Sri Lanka. Comment below and let us know what you think of it.”
Yes, you can edit the comments on your blog, but no, you shouldn’t delete the negative ones. Get rid of the profanity, the anonymous heckling, and the juvenile, but if you’re going to give your users a megaphone, you need to let them use it. If you don’t, no one will bother reading.
The real power of blogs comes from the fact that they can be as specific as you like. It’s easy to imagine a blog about the quest to create a new pricing model for adopting dogs from your animal shelter, or to enable a discussion about a particularly contentious AJAX coding convention at your open-source software group. Most of these blogs will be ignored, but some (perhaps more than some) will gain a following and help spread the word about your work.
Obviously, in addition to allowing comments on your blog, the big win comes when fan club members build their own blogs (or when you convert bloggers into fan club members!). The tools are now available to do just that.
By Seth Godin
Seth is the author of more than seven books that have been bestsellers around the world. His books include Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. He was the founder of Yoyodyne, the Net’s first direct marketer, and was formerly VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! His new gig is called Squidoo.
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