Marketing blogs are not meant to be a digital garden

Not all blogs can be addressed as gardens. I think that if you are building a blog as a marketing strategy , you must be consequent with that approach. A marketing blog is the utmost form of performative blogging . You need to generate content that serves the audience of your product. It will help with ranking better on Google, and also to create more empathy towards your services. You are not trying to understand who your audience is, you are trying to captivate whoever you defined as audience already.

But it also means you must approach blogging as a job, and not as a tool for enjoyment. You must lay out a plan, define what keywords must be included, how often are articles going to be published and, more importantly, how to upsell to your guests. At some point you want to transform a reader to a customer. Doing proper blogging as a side-project is almost impossible. Writing takes too much time to actually offset its costs.

It may also be that a blog is not a just a content-creation engine for another product, but the blog itself is the product . I think nesslabs and its associated "garden" mentalnodes are a good example of how to build an entire content scheme that delivers enough value but not all of it. That is how you are lured into becoming a payed member of a closed community. It requires a lot of time and effort, and more importantly a lot of consistency, to achieve what Anne-Laure le Cunff achieved. Her blog is not about selling a concrete product, but the idea that if you are interested in the content, there is value in connecting with other readers. Do you think it is by chance that the article have no comments?

There are many other examples around, but nesslabs is the first one I get to see born, grow, and flourish to become a successful business. However, marketing blogs require new content to be released in order to keep the audience and the algorithms happy. Improving on old notes has a relatively low impact as a marketing strategy. As a customer, I wouldn't like updates every two days about a couple of lines that you improved in your writing of an article that I already saw two months ago.