A Business Owner Laments his Junk Blog in 2013

In 2013 our blog was a poster child for mediocrity. Each post was outsourced for the cost of a jam doughnut and about as useful to a wider audience as Kim Jung-un is to his people.

Yes, I was as bad as him!

I’m writing this post because I want to provide a candid account of our failed blogging strategy last year. Many other businesses owners may be struggling with their own approach to blogging. I hope this post resonates with them and perhaps helps clarify their thinking. So I encourage you to share it around.

Later I’ll touch on the new appreciation we’ve developed for the power of blogging. We’ve also thought deeply about the business we want to be. As I’ll explain, expect our blog in 2014 to reflect this thinking.

To provide some context, I founded an online business in Australia a few years ago (we edit stuff, like books and theses). I’m not a lone wolf in the business, but as the owner, blogging is firmly my responsibility.

Our deeply flawed year of blogging in 2013 went as follows. We had the functionality to blog set up on our website at the very start of the year. A Facebook business page was simultaneously created. My aim was to blog regularly and make us more attractive to Google. Perhaps also use Facebook to increase traffic to our site. Not a revolutionary marketing strategy by any means, but the intention seemed sound.

But the reality of blogging quickly kicked in. It’s time consuming. A magic fairy that writes really good blogs posts on demand never appeared, at least for me.

I was busy running the business from day-to-day, doing the usual stuff and spending time plotting industry domination. I also did some work for my old employer – new businesses aren’t always money making machines from the get go. However, there are many busy business owners that make blog writing a priority. I chose not to last year.

But I was adamant that churning out regular keyword rich content was required. My thought process at the time was pretty simplistic and went something like this. Most of our customers tended to come to our website via a search engine. I believed we offered a compelling enough service. Therefore, the key to business success was merely to maximise our position on Google for certain keywords. And that Google loved new content.

The obvious solution to have a regular blog without effort on my part was outsourcing. It wasn’t a diabolical business decision in itself. Some businesses probably outsource their blog writing quite successfully.

The thing is that in 2013 money was in short supply. Business was OK. We had a good concept and did things differently from the competition. However, we were young, margins were slim and we certainly couldn’t justify hiring a professional copywriter or agency. Anyway, I figured all we needed was keyword rich content rather than high quality writing.

About this time I first heard of a fascinating micro-service website called Fiverr. People will do anything at your behest for $5. They’ll sing you a song or simply do something to make you laugh. Nothing was off-limits, even blog writing. As an online business in a competitive market, we rely on being efficient, and the lure of dirt cheap content was strong.

I ordered 20 blog posts from Fiverr periodically in 2013. I instructed each writer to focus on a particular topic and the number of times to repeat a certain keyword. Everything else was up to them. The standard of writing was mixed, but on average better than you might expect for $5. One glaring (and entirely predictable) flaw across every blog, however, was that the writer knew nothing about our industry. In terms of actual content, the blog posts were junk.

On purpose I never used the same writer more than twice. After all, they were writing a 400 word blog for only $5. I know the transaction was consensual but it seemed massively exploitative on my end. I personally wouldn’t use an expletive in front of my Mum for less than $20. Yet they probably spent a few hours writing each blog post. And they were generally OK pieces of writing in themselves except for the whole content thing.

These $5 posts were published on our blog throughout the year. My ongoing justification was that there was no real downside in doing so and that SEO was paramount. Most were at least written by a native English speaker. Importantly all were keyword rich. Google uses a very clever algorithm, but I didn’t think it would mind that we were posting worthless content procured from slave labour.

So that was our company blog in 2013. I spent pocket change to hire an array of people with no industry knowledge to write keyword rich blog posts. Content marketing budget for the entire year = cost of a pair of sneakers.

You can tell I look back on last year with much regret. I don’t mind that our blog in 2013 won’t win a prize for literature. A business blog doesn’t have to be written elegantly to be effective. The main issue, of course, with cheaply outsourcing your content is that the content itself is crap. Our blog was just a bunch of words devoid of meaning. I was publishing useless keyword rich fodder on my website – the one that was lovingly crafted in every other respect – solely to please a search engine.

Whether or not potential customers were actively turned off by examining our vacuous blog is an open question. Maybe a few were. My bigger misgiving about everything, however, is one of opportunity cost. I now realise that a blog can be a great way to communicate with a wider audience, some of whom might even need you one day. A business owner especially is in a unique position to share their perspective on the industry they operate in.

I guess the question can still be asked whether such blogging actually helps your Google rank, and did our bottom line benefit from it? It’s probably impossible to quantify. But I now think it’s doubtful. My 2013 strategy seems hopelessly counterproductive in hindsight: Google tends to favour any sort of original content that is shared widely over static keyword heavy writing lying idle on your website.

I don’t care if our blogging strategy last year did achieve its objective with Google and made us a few extra dollars. I’ve given considerable thought into the type of business we should be. I want us to be an industry leader – our blog being one component – rather than a cynical company that takes a short cut to achieve a profit. A strategy of outsourcing each blog post for $5 a pop with the sole intention of improving your Google rank is not one that a leading company would adopt in any industry. I’ll blog next week about other changes you’ll soon see in our business that reflect this philosophy (our website is currently being completely re-written, for example)

So expect our blog in 2014 to at least be original. But more than that as a business owner I think I can provide value and show thought leadership. I have ideas about editing and writing in general. I want to share them and hear what other people think in return. We now have rather active Twitter and Google+ accounts set up and we’ve redoubled our efforts on Facebook. The onus is on us to produce interesting content.

But forgive me if a keyword or two is thrown in – old habits are very hard to break.