Source: Social Email Marketing

By J-P De Clerck

In my humble opinion, blogging is a very honest, authentic and important thing. It is about trying to show the personality of your business and yourself. It is about questioning, informing, sharing, exchanging and getting inspiration from the people that interact with your content, be it by commenting, mailing you or adding little remarks in their retweets.

However, if you are looking to boost traffic for the sake of it, form seems to prevail over content and textbook rules over authenticity. The question that arises is one of branding and of balance between best practices, what people want and who you are.

There are millions of blogging tips. If you apply them you score from the traffic viewpoint. It’s so easy to generate blog traffic, really. There is also the question what your blog readers want and what goals you want to achieve.

Until now the goal of my small “company blog” was very simple: try to write insightful stuff, the best way I could and realizing I cannot be better than I am. My insights are what they are. Valuable for some, crap for others. You can’t please everyone and, as I tell my kids, all you can do is try to do the best you can, realizing your own limits and at the same time your growth potential. No one is perfect.

What the readers of my blog want are tips, advice etc. It is known that this kind of content must be brief, to-the-point etc. to appeal. It is also known that blog readers have a short attention span and so, the textbook, says you need the inverted pyramid style and blah blah. We all know the best practices of writing blog posts: provide value, use appealing titles, bullet points, you know, the whole thing. But what if this doesn’t reflect who you are?

I strongly feel that a blog should reflect more the personality of the brand and author than follow the “2,000 blogging tips” textbooks.