How to tell when your blog is just a good intention

I sat down in a meeting three years ago with two prospective website clients in the same day. Both of them had the same story:

“We hired someone to do a new website for us, they did, and that’s how it’s been since it launched.”

“And you launched it in June of last year, right?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“The “tell” for this is always the same for small businesses: there’s a “blog” section, it has about three posts in it, and the first is always the day a new site launches.”

Everyone knows the intrinsic value of having a blog because everyone wants to have a good reason to send emails, share updates on Facebook, and generally have things to say.

The problem is no one wants to keep that up. Or people get busy. Or you sit down to work on a few posts at once, you realize that took you far longer than you expected, and now you’re tired of it.

The result is always the same: a blog with three or four posts, all published almost exactly one month apart, and then they stop. Just like the veggie smoothies in the fridge you never drank or those new running shoes you never lace up.

Small boutique businesses inherently understand this, but some things just can’t be scaled with automation. There is no (useful) AI that can just auto-blog on behalf of your business. No app can write what your fundraiser meant for the grant recipients or how a team member’s new certification means new services.

Treat a poorly maintained blog like any other “under construction” page on your website: banish them. Hide it and remove all the links to it from the site. It’s not helping. It annoys customers because it seems half-finished, like a road project with no end date and no visible progress.

If you can’t devote the resources to it, then admit that and either regroup or just say, “This isn’t something we’re doing.” You already instinctively do this for lots of other things. You’re probably not on TikTok or posting to Instagram every hour of the day or some other channel. So pick your battles and put effort where you can.

If you want some help to fill up your blog semi-automatically with my help, get started here and tell me what your website is.