Over the past month I’ve been going through a blogging drought. The tough part about that has not been coming up with content or the time to produce it. It’s been the topic.
– I have purposely focused all my content here around Marketing and Communications –
I enjoy the fact that I approach everyday as a journalist. I love discovering new things and sharing them with you, but for everything that was not about marketing, I’ve shared in small snippets through status updates on social networks. This hasn’t left me much room to actually give a full fledged thought on other areas of my life.
Of course there are certain sites that I can definitely give my full opinion, but then to really find out who I am will take you multiple clicks and searches to actually figure that out. This then takes me to my first thought
– “What am I trying to brand?” –
I’ve been blogging since 2005, and it wasn’t until this past year that I decided to move away from branding my thoughts to a corporate entity to branding my thoughts to my name. The reason behind this decision was that company’s can come and go, by my knowledge and experiences will always be with me.
I believe a message should be simple to understand. The more focused you are on your audience and offerings the easier it will be to grow your business. I made the decision to focus all my blog content on davevanz.com towards marketing and communications in order to attract people like you to hire me based on my talents. My goal was to make sure people knew what I did.
I accomplished that.
Unfortunately this past month has been a struggle, because I’ve had a lot of things to say, but none of them were around the topic of the site. So I didn’t blog.
As I pondered this situation I came across a blog by Patrick Reyes. He was facing a similar dilema and made the decision to separate his blog topics onto different sites. I’ve spoken with Patrick a couple times online, but this was the first time I spoke with him on the phone. Both of us share common interests, but some of our reasons for having a site were different.
I realized quickly, there are pros and cons to both sides. Patrick seemed to feel there needed to be a separation with his, whereas I was hoping to find the reason to bring different content to mine. (I just needed to assure myself that it would bring value to my audience)
I posed the same question to a few other people, and a few hours later, I believe I found my answer.
I called up my friend Shawn Vincent here in Orlando who hosts the Digital Marketing Revolution. We met when I began looking for like-minded people after moving here earlier in the year.
Chatting with him, he brought up a point that hit home with me. He referred to a conversation we had a few weeks ago about a guy who runs a business and targets CEO’s that are into motorcycles. I asked him if this guy repaired bikes and he said no. He targets them because they have common interests. When he gets a customer that’s into motorcycles, the odds of that new customer growing into a great customer is highly likely based on that similar interest.
– They relate to each other! –
This was exactly what I needed to hear to feel I could do what I wanted to do and remain on target with my goals.
When you hire me, you’re not buying into a company, you’re buying into Dave Vanz. (3rd person FTW!)
I like that, and I hope you will too.
Dave, we certainly have different objectives. For me initially, blogging was something that I wanted to try out. I then realized it was therapeutic. After that, I realized I was learning a lot through other blogs that I subscribed to and had opinions and ideas that I wanted to freely share.
As I continued, I felt my personal blog truly became that…personal. I talked about my faith in God, my wife and my kids. When I infused thoughts and opinions on social media, technology, or business, it began to feel out of place. That’s why I posed the question to those that regularly read my blog and if you read the comments, overwhelmingly those that commented agreed that separating the 2 was the right choice.
I know from my conversation with you earlier this week, you have an entirely different set of objectives. You have a business to run and are marketing the work you do. Depending on what the “other” content is that you want to bring here, I certainly think they can live together.
Good luck with everything!