Blog Don'ts #6: Don't be a perfectionist

Your blog doesn't have to be perfect to be effective. Keep in mind what the purpose of your blog is, to attract an audience, build a readership, make relationships, and make sales as a result of those relationships.

The first part of that equation, attract an audience, will never happen if you feel you have to be 'perfect' when writing the blog. That's because writing perfect posts takes hours. You might manage this the first couple of weeks on your new blog, but you will run out of time and energy very quickly with this approach.

And as soon as you start slipping below the 2-3 post/week minimum you are dead. Your readers stop visiting you and search engines stop indexing you. As a result, no one links to your posts any longer and your traffic falls off the map. This happened with Pajama Market during July when I was moving from Vermont to Wisconsin. My traffic, which had been growing, totally plummeted.

Jim Hopkins blog quoted a tea room owner named Jill Dickey today.

"We already have a website and communicate with our customers via e-mail. The less-formal blog format just doesn't seem to fit with the tea room's style. A blog would have to be tremendously entertaining for our customers or employees to bother reading it. And unless the 24-hour day suddenly expands, I wouldn't have time to crank out a work of great literature daily."

What a shame. Here's the perfect candidate to write a blog. Jim said she used to be the managing editor at a well-known magazine, so we know she can write. Apparently, she doesn't feel that she can lower herself to blog-writing standards or her customers will be bored. Well, my readers, I hope I haven't bored you with this entry.

Technorati : jill dickey, jim hopkins, perfectionist blogger, retro tea room, usa today

Comments

[manzkee]

You're right. And I don't think there's a perfect blog either. Great tips BTW and I wasn't bored reading it,