The Foundation of Blogging Success – Part 5: Focus

Finally, we’re to part 5 of my comments on “the five prerequisites for having a successful blog” from ProBlogger written by Tony Hung of DeepJiveInterests. Doing these comments in five parts was an experiment – one that I don’t think I’ll repeat anytime soon. While I love the topic, it became a bit boring for me to continue to write on this topic. So let’s close it out with a look at Focus.

Blogs that are fascinating, regular reads, that are also are reader-centered do best when they are also focused like a laser. And I mean “focused” and consistent in every single way. Focused in their identity and writing style, focused in their content, and focused in their intent to serve their reader. Blogs that are wishy-washy, who don't know who they are, who change their kind of writing “voice” repeatedly, who vascillate on their opinions, who introduce nonsensical and unrelated topics are blogs that will find it difficult to succeed.

The other benefit of focus, is that irrespective of your actual authority, people will inherently trust, and believe you to be a thought leader in a given area, if you consistently blog on a particular area of interest for a long enough period of time in an intelligent enough way. Thought leadership is important, because when people will look for opinion makers, they'll turn to you. When they'll want partners they'll turn to you. When the mainstream media is interested in a quote, they'll turn to you. And when other bloggers need guest bloggers, they might turn to you too.

And when people are looking for a product or service that will benefit their life, they’ll turn to you. No kidding. So much of internet marketing today is about building trust with your audience base to the point that they decide to buy your products and services.

What I’ve seen, and one of the reasons I began blogging, was because I see blogging as being the quintessential vehicle for building ongoing and lasting customer support.

With your blog, people can read about what you know, interact with you on topics and comment on what you say and watch the response. They can key tabs on what you’re writing about with feeds. They can even look at old posts to see if you’ve specifically covered their needs.

All-in-all, it’s highly likely that blogging will become a major force in marketing businesses. And with small businesses often having few resources, blogging becomes a great way to get the message out about your business without having to spend gobs of money. A little time, a little patience, and a little know-how is all it takes.

As I mentioned, this is the end of me doing series writing for a while. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.