Is Your Blog a Product or a Service?

Posted April 9th, 2010 / By David Griffiths in Persistance

Unless you’re blogging purely for fun, there’s likely to be some kind of financial or compensatory motivation behind the writing. And even if you are just writing for fun, you’ll probably have some interest in monitoring readership statistics as the blog grows and changes.

It’s something of a philosophical concern, but it’s worth asking: is my blog a product or a service? If it’s a limited-run sort of a thing, and you don’t intend on supporting any of the content or moderating comments, then you your blog could be considered a product. But if you intend to continue publishing into the foreseeable future, and maintain the content and the community that forms around it, then your blogging enterprise really revolves around a service.

Why does this matter? It matters because if you think of your blog as a product when it’s really a service, you may find yourself ill-equipped to deal with the ongoing costs of serving your user base.

Service-oriented blogging affects frequency

I do my best to be real. And what’s real to me is that many blogs fail because the owner/publisher in charge doesn’t fully account for the cost of maintaining the service. Here’s an illustration of what I mean:

Blogger Alex runs some self-analysis and decides that the best times to write are evenings on three weekdays, and on Sunday mornings. Alex estimates that keeping to a 4 posts-per-week schedule will be enough to keep readers interested, and drive up traffic whilst making the most of downtime when creative energy is high.

However. What Alex doesn’t realise is that although individual posts might be considered products destined for a market of attention, really what’s on offer is a comprehensive service. A service that involves thoughtful research, inspiration management, the discipline of sticking to a reliable formula, ensuring a great technical delivery, and the positive touch of a human presence.

Ultimately Alex’s initial estimate of the time involved falls short of reality because all these other items need to be taken care of. What’s likely to happen is that Alex will feel some obligation to hit the original scheduling target and start working on the blog outside the “optimum hours” originally determined by careful self-inventory of “up” times and surplus attention.

The goal is to survive

When faced with the prospect of not hitting a frequency or coverage goal, it’s important to look at the big picture. The absolute most important thing in pursuing a professional or hobbyist blogging career is persistence. I like to say “existence contains persistence”, and this is particularly true of working to maintain a viable service as writer-publisher.

In the fictitious case of Alex, the best course of action is to take stock of the situation as it is, and not as it could or should be, and realise that a 1 post-per-week goal is a better way to use one of the four overall work sessions. The other three can be shared between additional service elements like research, delivery maintenance, customer contact, and business development.

If all this sounds rather clinical, consider that the best blogs are the ones run by people who handle their responsibilities well. It’s advisable to foster one’s ability to switch modes from romantic to professional, and realise that blogging is a rewarding but also quite rigorous personal discipline.

I wish you all the very best of luck.

David loves working with people and being creative. He blogs at DX Griffiths.com, and posts as @dxgriffiths on Twitter. You can contact him anytime via LinkedIn.