You don’t have to search hard for people online these days who talk about the difficulty of reaching your core audience with blog content. In fact, I know this is for book authors (probably fiction), but you could just as well make this argument for any type of business. And the author is talking specifically about social media, but many book authors (and business owners) write blog posts then share the through social media as a part of their overall marketing strategy, so I’m going to lump blogging and social media here into one heap.
Does Blogging/Social Media Work?
I could take the position that a lot of people are doing it and therefore it must be working, because why would so many people be engaged in an activity that wasn’t working? I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to quote from the above-linked article.
It’s 2012. I’m sitting at a table in the front of the room, a microphone poised to capture my every word. At this local writing conference, I am considered a rock star. Everyone in the audience wants what I have–a three-book contract with a traditional publishing company. Their eyes are hungry, their pens poised over notebooks. We take a question from the crowd.
“How do I build a platform and make money with my blog?” a woman asks.
“Build a time machine and go back to 2005 and start your blog then,” I say.
That may seem like a strange statement, and it really is. At first glance, it appears to be saying that time is the important factor here. If you had started your blog 11 years ago (or 7), then you’d be doing fine, so by the same token, if you start your blog now, then seven (or 11) years from now you should have a top-notch blog. Except that’s not what the author is saying.
Maybe in a sense, that is what she’s saying. However, a lot of other things have happened since 2005 that change the blogging/social media landscape. Google has changed its search algorithms thousands of times. Some of the major updates have drastically changed how search results are configured. Today’s bloggers have to take that into consideration as well.
Blogging Versus E-mail
But let’s get to the heart of the question: Is blogging/social media a better strategy or is it e-mail?
One could criticize e-mail as having its own special problems. These days, everyone and his brother has a free download to offer in exchange for e-mail addresses. People are getting tired of seeing those. Nevertheless, that strategy still works even if it doesn’t work as well as it used to.
The question asked doesn’t do justice, really, to either blogging or e-mail. It’s not a question of either/or. The savvy online marketer must have a strategy to allows you to incorporate both tactics into your overall marketing plan. Both are more effective when they work together.