It’s been a long time since you went out with this one friend of yours, so when she asked if you wanted to hit this concert she was going to, you went ahead and said ok. You didn’t really know a whole lot about the group and you didn’t really like their genre of music at all, but hey, what are friends for. While you’re at this concert, one of the songs is performed with particular gusto, and you actually find yourself taken aback a bit and really enjoying it, or at least you feel pleasantly surprised.
As you’re heading out the doors, you pass by the merchandise table. Here’s the question.
Do you buy the CD?
Passion Builds Engagement, But Does It Build Your Business?
I have been thinking about the posts that Mack Collier and Lisa Petrilli wrote this week about passionate blogging. I have been thinking about many, many other posts about blogging with passion too – how you can tell when someone is phoning it in.
If you want to have a successful blog and a great blog community, passion is necessary. If you don’t really care about what you’re writing, it will be readily apparent. Your best effort won’t be spent on something you don’t really care about. Your readers will get bored, and they’ll figure that if you don’t care, they probably don’t need to.
If you are a passionate blogger, you will bring people back again and again, because passion is contagious. When you see someone really revved up, it gets your own jets going, right? It’s like the movie The Soloist. Robert Downey Jr’s character didn’t really care about the cello, but his life was transformed by the passion Jamie Fox’s character had for the cello and for all music. You love seeing someone throwing their heart and soul into something.
When you are passionate, it’s easy to talk to people about your beliefs and your objectives. You could talk to a wall about those things if you wanted to. With a message to bring and a desire to spread that message, engaging is a natural progression.
Does this guarantee that your business will grow?
A growing blog does not equate to a growing business
A lot of people think that if they can get their blog to be “big,” business will naturally follow. This is not a step-by-step progression though. Getting a lot of traffic to your blog means that potentially, your chances for getting more prospects to be aware of you will increase.
You need to connect the dots. If your business is Social Media consultation, writing passionately about how beautiful nature is will not (most likely) bring you more customers. You might get tons of comments and tons of retweets, but those might be from nature lovers or from people who just enjoyed your post. People who need help with their Social Media marketing will not necessarily say, “Ah, this person blogs passionately, and therefore I will entrust them with thousands of dollars.
Can a blogger without passion grow his or her business?
This begs the question: If a blogger is reaching the right group of people and is writing the exact kind of posts that group wants, even if the blogger is sort of dry and to the point, will that blogger’s business grow? Do you need passion in your blog posts to grow your business, or do you just need the right content written in the right way to the right people?
Will the lack of passion reduce the amount of engagement, thus reducing the number of people who come back to the blog on a regular basis?
I don’t have an answer
This is really a rhetorical question. I can’t say definitively that one or the other scenario is 100% true. I’m hoping you will jump in and tell me what side of the fence you’re on. Do you need passion to grow your business? Is it something else? Can a business flourish if a blogger is consistent but kind of dull?
What do you think?
This is post #52 in The Engagement Series. If you’re worried about missing a post, please hit the subscribe button!
Image by Marinka van Holten. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mrinkk