I’m not exactly the Ace of Cakes. I’m a decent cook, but I’m no baker. Knowing this about myself, but wanting to bake a birthday cake for my step-daughter’s birthday, I did what any normal man would do: I bought a cake mix and a can of frosting.
You’d think it would be foolproof. All I had to do was follow the instructions on the box. Water, vegetable oil, three eggs, a bowl, a mixer, and a 9″ x 13″ cake pan. How hard could it be? I mixed it all up, poured the batter into my cake pan, and tossed it into the oven (which I had even remembered to preheat).
After about twenty minutes or so, I went to check on it. I couldn’t see in the oven through the glass too well because of the glare on the glass in the oven door window, so I had to open the door to take a look (the light in the oven has been out for years).
The cake was like a golden hill growing up in a bulge out of the cake pan.
I was pretty sure cakes aren’t supposed to do that.
Turns out I had used what I thought was the correctly sized cake pan, but it was in fact too small. The cake had nowhere to go but up. I didn’t measure the cake pan. I just picked something out of the cabinet that looked cake pan-ish. I mean, what could go wrong?
The lesson from this is that we are all completely stupid, sometimes. We suck at following directions. We don’t like to be told what to do. We think we’re smarter than we are, and that we’ll “figure it out.” Over 50% of the population consider themselves “above average,” right? 
Yeah…
- Succeeding with your blog marketing is like baking a cake. Recipes and instructions are everywhere, but people often miss something crucial, like making it obvious what your blog is about when a complete stranger lands on it.
- Using a mix will certainly be cheap and save you time, but it won’t be as good as homemade. Your blog can be another “me too” blog and have cheap content, but it will be much more palatable to your hungry audience if it’s original and has a delicious but unique flavor. Maybe you want to do the blog equivalent of throwing in some rum or some chili powder into your chocolate cake. Spice things up.
- People aren’t going to fall over themselves and shove each other out of the way to get at cake from a mix, but they will for awesome homemade cake. Great cake totally commands people, as if they had no will of their own. Wouldn’t you want your blog to be like that?
- At least I made a damn cake. It still tasted good, even if it looked ugly. Cake, after all, is still cake. Too many people do the blog equivalent to thinking they have to become the “Cake Boss” before they can even start baking. How do you think he got to be the Cake Boss? By baking a zillion cakes, probably more of which were failures than he’d like to admit.
- If you bake enough cakes, you really get an instinctual feel for how it’s all going to come together in the final product.
- No matter how many cakes you bake, you still need to measure (and that goes for the length and width of cake pans, too).
- Great frosting does not make up for a bad cake. Blog “frosting” is anything that sweetens the package, but which could easily become too much of a good thing. Do you really need five different social blogging widgets that show who’s visiting?
- If you make a German chocolate cake before you discover that your dinner guests hate coconut, you will be eating that thing all by yourself for a few days. Write about topics that help your audience so much they can’t bear to live without your blog. I asked my step-daughter what kind of cake she wanted. I didn’t assume that I knew, or worse yet, made a cake that I would have liked, but which my family would have hated.
- You don’t need the same kind of oven that Martha would use. Even if all you have is an EZ-Bake, you can still bake cakes—really small cakes, but hey. Point is, it’s not the tools as much as it’s the knowledge and drive.
You see? Anyone can bake up a great blog. Just make sure you follow your recipe correctly.
What’s your recipe for baking a great blog?