Every new endeavor–especially in business–must offer a worthy return for the effort. That return can take many forms, but we usually measure it in money. In countless ways, we trade time and money for each other. If you have time, you don’t need to spend a lot of money paying someone to fix your car. You can take the time to learn to fix it yourself and spend time fixing it. If you have time, you can learn what it takes to be a computer network administrator and spend a lot of time dealing with your company’s network.
What You Buy and What You Do Yourself
But you don’t do either of those things, do you? No. You gladly pay money instead of time to have someone else take care of it. But here you are, doing what it takes to run a business or operate a high level in a business, and you want your business to have a blog. You may have already paid somebody to design it, but what do you do with it, now? Blogs have a learning curve, just like everything else.
Your Readers are Expecting You
When time is of the essence, and you want to get up to speed in something without making all the typical mistakes, you either pay someone to do it for you or you get help. In the other examples I’ve used in this post already–auto repair, network administration, and blog design–you pay someone else to do it for you. But blogging (writing posts, responding to comments, etc.) is a special case, because everyone expects a blog to be written by a real person who works for or who owns the business. Your blog’s readers expect… you!
This is where you need not a blog designer, but a blog consultant or a blog coach. Blog coaching is a relatively new field, but it’s similar to business coaching or life coaching in many ways. Blog coaching shortens the blogging learning curve and helps you be the best you can at it in the shortest possible time. If you’re serious about having the benefits of a business blog, you will find a good blog coach or consultant is well worth your investment. This is a clear value in trading money for time.
What Does a Blog Coach Do For You?
A blog coach helps you like a sports coach helps you: by devising strategies, observing the situation, and recommending a particular play or strategy. A blog coach doesn’t blog for you, but provides suggestions and feedback so that you become the best blogger you can be in a short time.
Specifically, a good blog coach can:
- Recommend post topics
- Guide you through the ins and outs of your blogging software
- Provide you with helpful resources that you wouldn’t know about
- Help you write better blog posts that are cohesive, to the point, personable, and linkable
- Help you learn how to efficiently perform research for your posts
- Answer any questions that you have and explain terms, concepts, and practices related to blogging
- Advise you on how to respond to commenters and how to comment on other blogs
General Resources Can’t Beat Personal Assistance
Tailored Just for You
You could learn many of the above points on your own if you had the time, but you’d make mistakes along the way and it would take a long time. There are plenty of resources online designed to help you with many of these things, but there’s nothing like having a real human being you can call or email for advice about your blog, not just on blogging in general. There are many wonderful how-to-blog blogs out there, but they’re not helping you with your specific blog and its requirements. They don’t look at a draft you wrote and offer specific recommendations. They don’t know your needs like your blog coach does.
If you really want to get off the ground with blogging, and do it right and do it quickly, don’t do everything yourself. Get tailored personal assistance. Get a blog coach.
Technorati Tags: blog coach, blog coaching, blog consultant, blog consulting
I think that sometimes many people underestimate the value of a blogging coach(or atleast a decent one). I have began to hear more and more positive feedback from certain individuals who have used blog coaches to further their traffic, rankings, etc. Very good blog Michael, you really have something brewing here!
Bunk, thanks very much! I appreciate it. I really love the concept and the topics you’re doing at your blog, as well!
[...] Blogging With Michael Martine: Learn to Blog Better, Faster, and with Fewer Mistakes – Michael, as I think I might have mentioned before, is one of the meta-bloggers who really gets it [...]
Some valuable tips offered – I like the 7 points you listed.
Thanks very much, Susan!
[...] Blog coaching shortens the blogging learning curve and helps you be the best you can at it in the shortest possible time. If you’re serious about having the benefits of a business blog, you will find a good blog coach or consultant is well worth your investment. Michael Martine on Learn to Blog Better, Faster, and with Fewer Mistakes [...]
i especially loved this post… the help of a blog coach in suggesting topics for a blog is really interesting, for often we come across a major writer’s block and nothing jus seems worthy to be blogged abt… u r also right abt the technical part in which some help is required. technical help and suggestions abt layout go a long way in getting an attractive blog..
This is a really interesting niche you are pursuing. Like anything else that needs to be mastered over time, good blogging looks easy and natural but is actually quite challenging. I’m a novice and learning by trial and error and reading other blogs. I really admire people who have an engaging and compelling writing style. I can see where having a coach would really shorten the learning curve and produce greater results much faster.
@Liz: Thank you! It’s true. It is harder than it looks in many ways, but I think the benefits are undeniable. The problem with reading other blogs is that the information on them–even mine–isn’t personalized or tailored to you and your blog, your situation. Having a blog coach definitely shortens the learning curve. One of my clients recently created a blog with my help and she had never done this before. She did it in a matter of a few hours whereas otherwise she could have toiled away for days making all kinds of mistakes.