I’m back from my family vacation in Canada. While I was away, Convince & Convert featured 11 guest blog posts from friends, clients, and colleagues. Some of the guest writers blog on occasion at their own sites. None of them blog routinely.
You might expect that this blog that has been written almost entirely by me for two years would experience a bit of a lull during this period, as different authors with less blogging experience took over.
You would be entirely wrong.
Instead, traffic here on Convince & Convert is actually UP since I went on vacation. Visits are up. Page views are up. Retweets are up. RSS subscriptions are up.
First of all, tremendous thanks to the incredible team of guest bloggers who did an amazing job keeping the content fresh, and the conversation lively.
Second, this circumstance raises an important question: Are You Growing Your Voices?
Certainly, there is a benefit to creating content on a daily basis. Whether it’s blog posts, video blogs, Powerpoint presentations, podcasts, haiku, or graffiti art, practice makes the production process easier. But, it doesn’t make the ideas any better. Don’t mistake experience for expertise. Those words are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. The former is based on repetition, the latter on mastery. Blogging every day doesn’t make you a better thinker or consultant, it makes you faster at WordPress formatting.
Spread the Love
It’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on one or a few persons in your organization to be the content creation mules. They like it. They’re pretty good at it. Nobody else is that eager to wear the thorny blogging crown. But remember, every successful content creator starts the same way – with no audience, and a blinking cursor. Chris Brogan started with zero posts and zero readers. Same with Gary Vaynerchuk, who started his uber-popular video blog because he’s not a very good writer. Before Permission Marketing, how much audience did Seth Godin have?
To continue invigorating your content, you have to always be recruiting new voices. They’ll bring a different perspective, tonality, and topical focus to your content initiatives. What I really appreciated about the C&C guest bloggers is that almost across-the-board they wrote about topics that I never would have thought to have tackled. I couldn’t write Katie Van Domelan’s post about social media listening tools. I don’t have the chops to write Mike Corak’s piece on the role of language in content marketing. Josh Lysne contributed a social marketing management process (and companion document) that I’d never seen. Indra Gardiner covered social media law in a way that I cannot. Mike Cassidy made me (and a lot of other people) think differently about the intersection of social media strategy, and business objectives. And so on.
Whether it’s finding other people in your company to contribute an occasional post, recruiting guest bloggers from within your industry, or encouraging your customers to let you interview them for a podcast, make finding and supporting new content creators a mandatory part of your content marketing strategy. It will pay off.
How have you found and incorporated new voices into your content? The comments are yours.
[...] Find guest bloggers (and encourage guest blogging) – This will bring fresh content and a new audience to your blog. Consider asking other industry leaders, clients, vendors, or consultants to contribute and give them few brief guidelines so they know what direction to go in. If you aren’t already convinced of the value of this, Jay Baer talks about all the benefits of guest blogging in his post “Are you growing enough voices?“ [...]