How to Destroy Your Own Blog

For many small businesses, blogs are becoming a means of staying connected with customers and community. This is the place they discuss new products, great sales, and star employees. Their blog is also the place they are able to present themselves as a good citizen in their community. For these and other reasons, it is important that a blog, for a small business, sets a professional tone, but keeps their content as neighborly as possible.

There is an art to small business blogging that a good blogmaster seemingly has the ability to produce with little effort at all. However, this kind of writing takes years of experience and development before it flows from a blogmaster's keyboard with so little effort. Unfortunately, all the small business owner sees is that the blogmaster asks what he or she would like to say, then simply begins typing. The finished product is there, as if by magic. ...and then the mistake is made. The small business owner decides that he or she can do just as good a job of blogging as that paid blogmaster is doing. They fire the blogmaster and away they go... hacking at the keyboard, which results in a quick and tragic end to their blog.

At this writing, this blogmaster has just handed a very nice, tight little specialty blog over to its owner. Tonight, he is revamping his profile. He has also announced that he will be editing some of the articles. He wants them to be "folksy" - like he is - and to reflect his personal opinions and beliefs.

The small business owner, in this case, is rabidly right wing in his politics and espouses every conspiracy theory known to man. He is a Christian who does not attend church and "sort of" makes it up as he goes along on an odd collection of message boards. This is what he is planning to bring to his business blog. It does not seem to register with him that most of his customers are professional people, such as doctors, lawyers, and other business owners. It does not seem to register with him that, without this blog, his customers knew nothing of his increasingly far from mainstream leanings. He had a good business and he had the beginnings of an excellent, professionally run blog. Now, what he really thinks - about all sorts of non-business related issues - is going to be "out there"... for all to read, and it is going to not only destroy his blog, but hurt his business as well.

And the moral to this story, for blog owners, is: If you have a blog, whether it is for business or for personal use, you must consider your audience. If someone comes to your business blog looking for door knobs, they do not want to read your thoughts on the impending doom of the world and its causes. We continue to ask the unanswerable question: "What makes people write 'crazy things' when left alone with a blog or a message board?" We may never know the answer to that question, but every good blogmaster has watched in horror as one or more blog owners has destroyed what had begun as good work.

Tonight, this blogmaster is moving on because that poor blog, in the hands of its own owner, is headed for a slow-motion train wreck that nothing can stop.