Hit for Batting Average or Swing for the Fences?

When you’re blogging for your business, you often have several goals in mind:

1. You want your blog posts to attract visitors, especially new visitors, to your website.
2. You want every one of your carefully crafted articles to go viral, bringing your company fame and fortune.
3. You want your blog to have a consistency that reinforces your brand identity.

So what’s most important? Or do you need all three for successful business blogging? The experienced writers at Ray Access can answer these questions, but to make it more understandable, especially to those of you who appreciate the nuances of the sport of baseball, the explanations below come in the form of an analogy using the National Pastime. Everyone, even those who don’t like sports at all, should understand the key concepts by the end of this article.

Goal #1: Attract Visitors

Attracting visitors to your website is akin to bringing fans to the ballpark. If your team doesn’t bring in paying fans, your team may fold or be forced to move out of town. Either way, it’s bad for business.

The more fans you can entice to come to the park — through promotions, advertising or producing an exceptional product (i.e., a winning team) — the more successful your business. So attracting visitors (especially new visitors who’ve never seen your team) is actually the Number One job of business blogging. If your blog doesn’t do that, you might as well pack up and go home.

Goal #2: Go Viral

Having a blog post go viral is like hitting a homerun. It’s a big success, the best possible outcome from business blogging. Going viral means your blog post has been seen by thousands or hundreds of thousands of potential customers. It’s been shared on social media and garnered many comments. A viral blog post is like showing your company’s commercial during a telecast of the World Series.

But to accomplish viral business blogging, you need training and luck. It’s more difficult than it is to hit a homerun. And experts have stated that hitting a round baseball with a cylindrical bat is the most difficult thing to do in any sport. Hitting a homerun, then, is even more complicated. Yet somehow, it happens.

If you really put in the effort for every one of your posts in your business blogging efforts, you may get lucky and have some of your posts go viral, but that kind of effort takes time. You have to:

• Find the most attractive, most topical, most desirable and least competitive keywords (i.e., get your head in the game)
• Write a blog post that captures the imagination of your target market (i.e., refine your art through batting practice)
• Promote the blog post to the right audience at the right time for maximum visibility (i.e., make sure the media’s watching when you swing)
• Hope that the day you publish your masterpiece isn’t a big news day and your blog post gets swallowed in a sea of indifference (i.e., pray the game doesn’t get rained out)

Despite your best efforts, luck is always a factor. All you can do is put your best on display. The rest is up to the public — or at least the sliver of the public that forms your target market.

Goal #3: Blog Consistently

When you’re business blogging, being consistent week after week is similar to hitting for a high batting average. A hitter with a .300+ average gets on base more often than a slugger trying to hit homeruns every time up. That makes him “a tough out,” meaning he always finds a way to get the job done and so more often comes through in the clutch.

In business blogging, that kind of consistency has value. It shows you’re dedicated, professional and committed. When you post a new blog every week, you may hit homeruns rarely, if ever. But people get talking about you. Maybe they even look forward to your next blog post to appear.

Like hitting for a high batting average, business blogging takes focused and consistent work. You need time to come up with your topics. You need skill and practice to write week after week. And it matters that you write well. Producing garbage isn’t valuable to anyone. You can’t be up at the plate hacking at pitches like a golfer. You need a clean, level swing and a good batting eye.

Which Approach Scores More Runs?

Homeruns are dramatic. They can take your breath away, especially when they come at opportune moments. But if you swing for the fences every time you step to the plate, you may strike out more often than connecting. Dave Kingman is the perfect example of this all-or-nothing approach. Kingman hit 442 career homeruns, averaging 37 per season, which would put him in the top five most seasons. And yet Dave Kingman is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Hitting for a high average is also a beautiful sight — lacing line drives to the outfield wall, blooping base hits just over the infield’s reach and occasionally blasting a pitch into the seats. Most batting champions these days are not homerun hitters. Tony Gwynn is the perfect example of this consistent approach. He averaged a .338 batting average over 20 years, easily good enough to be in the top five most seasons. Tony Gwynn is in the Hall of Fame.

So in the end, when you take on the project of business blogging, you’ll score more runs by being a consistent hitter than by swinging for the fences. If you try for a homerun all the time, you may not publish often enough to make a difference. And your odds for an article going viral actually increase the more often you blog. So follow the example set by the writers at Ray Access: blog weekly, promote your work, and connect with your audience.

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Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.