Whether or not your organization currently has a blog in place, your first job is to determine if you need one. Not every business will benefit from a blog because not every business has something they want to tell people three times a week…or even twice a month. If yours is that business, acknowledge it and move on to a form of marketing that better serves your site.

As you seek to discover whether or not your organization can use a blog to help achieve its goals, you may find yourself coming to a determination of the blog’s purpose. It’s difficult to say what will matter most in the success of your blog, but without a clear, maintainable purpose, your blog will almost certainly not achieve greatness.

Regardless of how simple or silly some of the most popular blogs in the world seem to be, you can be sure that there is a clear purpose behind each one.
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Blogging has become so accessible that now anyone can join in. The sometimes frustrating side of this coin, however, is that…now anyone can join in.

Not everyone can do it well, though. And like a lot of other things in competitive areas, there’s a certain degree of natural selection at work, where those who produce average content get overlooked, and those who can deliver something remarkable gradually get nudged to the top.
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Too many organizations genuinely believe that having a blog in place and frequently updating it is enough. It’s a good start, but there’s something more that separates adequate blogs from the ones that get promoted by readers.

Where good blogging takes time and attention, great blogging requires both of those as well as a copious supply of creativity. Brainstorming the first possible blog posts may be fun, and even easy. But what happens when that initial material has been covered? What happens when the novelty and excitement of your new blog has worn off?
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