Blog Marketing Boxing Day Gifts

Blog Marketing has always been of interest to me. Two facts popped up on my radar in the past twenty-four hours that made me realize how much the world has changed because of Blogs and how different Blog Marketing can be to any other marketing channel.
Yesterday, I was reviewing my slide deck for the full-day seminar, Blogs – A Marketers’ Secret Weapon (which is done through the CMA – Canadian Marketing Association), and I have a slide about how often you should Blog. My answer (then) was a minimum of once a week. I say “then” because that deck was created about one year ago. I should probably change that slide to say once a day (if you can). That is how fast the Blog world changed. In an overly-simplistic way, Blogs used to be a great way to publish fresh content without having to deal with updating a website constantly. At the time, once a week seemed like a lot. Now, posting once daily seems like bare-minimum up-keep. For a Blog to get respect, ranking and readers, we’re demanding fresh content, constantly. I try and pump something out, at least, on a daily basis and I hardly feel like I am keeping pace with Blogs like Micro Persuasion and the like.
Fact number two: just because it’s the Holiday Season with offices closed and people away on holiday, don’t think – even for a second – that they’re not checking out Blogs even more frequently. I’ve seen the, “we’re going to slow down our Blog postings over the Holiday season,” and I would urge those Bloggers that have gone that route to take a look at their Blog stats.
I was just looking at my Blog stats for Sunday, December 24th, 2006. Sunday is usually a not-so-great day for Blog traffic regardless of month, but Christmas Eve traffic was through the roof. I had several thousand (yes, thousand) more unique users (this does not include RSS feeds) than the week before. Offices may be closed and people may be on “holiday,” but by the looks of my Blog stats (and we all know that Blog stats don’t lie), more people were checking out my Blog on Christmas Eve than any other Sunday this past year. “Holidays” may well mean that it’s time for me to chill out and catch up on all that good Blog stuff that I never really have enough time to focus on during my busy work day.
So my Boxing Day gifts to you are these two practical Blog Marketing new realities:
1. Blog often – more than once a day if you have the content and capacity.
2. Don’t slow down during the Holidays – that’s when most people finally have the time to read your brilliance.