While the British and the Americans share a language — well, mostly — and many traditions, there are some that are unique. In America summer begins with a three-day weekend at Memorial Day near the end of May and ends with another three-day weekend at the start of September, Labor Day.
In between is Independence Day on July 4th. Somehow we Americans are surprised that the Brits don’t take a day off to celebrate that day the Colonists threw off the yoke of imperial tyranny by eating hot dogs and watching baseball. Or something.
The Brits, I’ve come to learn from friends and helpful stories such as this, have their own summer season defined by the social season.
On both sides of the Atlantic the days are long, the parties plentiful, and there’s a huge temptation to take it easy on blogging. There’s nobody demanding that you blog, so it’s the easiest item to let slip to the bottom of the to-do list where it languishes like a plucked weed on the sidewalk.
Nobody’s paying that much attention, so why not just let it slide?
I run a blog writing service, and I see this up close. We sell thousands of blogs every month to businesses all around the world, and a few of the customers have been asking in the last couple weeks if they can ease up for the summer.
But you know which customers are NOT asking to ease up? The ones who really study Search Engine Optimization. They actually like it when competitors take it easy for the summer.
Because after summer is over, when the days once again are getting shorter and business is really ramping up, they are doing very well in all aspects.
They know that Google’s robots don’t “take it easy” in the summer. They know that blogging works, but that it also takes time. They know not to let their ego get too tied up in the posts and not to fret over every single syllable before putting the posts up. They know not to get disheartened if a blog gets no comments and not many social shares.
In short, the most successful marketers and agencies know that they have to get their blogging done every single week, no matter the season, because that’s how to make business thrive and fill the top of the sales funnel.
Net-Results has great tools. There’s a raft of others have fantastic marketing automation tools of all shapes and sizes. You should use them and embrace them. The one thing those tools can’t do is write blog posts for you. For that, you need a human being. There’s simply no way to write original content without a human being doing the writing.
Here’s my painful story: I woke up on the Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend and thought about how I wished I were 25 pounds lighter for the poolside barbecue I was set to attend a couple days later. Couldn’t be done, of course.
But it’s possible I could lose some weight by July 4th, and I might be able to get in OK shape by Labor Day. In the U.K., there’s no way you’ll be in shape by Royal Ascot, but perhaps by the International Musicians’ Seminar?
It’s the same way with blogging. There’s no such thing as a “blogging emergency.” There’s only a blogging strategy. It clearly works — better than anything else in this crazy “inbound content marketing” world we live in. But it only works with time. I can’t lose 25 pounds in one weekend and I can’t game Google into getting great search results overnight. (Well, it may be possible, but it will only last until Google changes its algorithms again, which happens quite often these days.)
But I can lose weight if I eat sensibly and exercise, and I can get my search rankings in order and my site in great shape if I blog often enough about topics that visitors to my site will find interesting.
My hunch is that you are like me and you want your business to do as well as it can this summer, and then really take off in the fall. The best way to do that is to keep your foot on the gas of the blogging engine all summer long, no matter what side of the car the steering wheel is on.
