On first glance, the only purpose of a blog post, or indeed any sort of content that comes into your inbox, is to provide some impetus to encourage you towards a transaction.
That remains the case, but if that is the only reason, we have arrived at the point where AI can spit out posts by the dozen that purport to serve that purpose.
Not a good place to spend your time if you are on the receiving end, and it serves to degrade the expected standard of all posts.
By contrast, a post that evolves from an idea, problem, or situation faced by a real business, which is intended to offer some level of insight into the way forward can be of immense value, when the right people find it.
Therein lies the attention challenge of those writing posts intended for the latter reason. How do you get the attention the effort reasonably deserves?
If, like me, you do not care much for the attention, or the lead generation potential of posts, you can then produce them with an entirely different objective.
That objective is to clarify your own thinking sufficiently to be able to articulate it to others. That clarification and articulation is what makes the research, thinking and writing of a post valuable. Whether others see it, think about it, and take some sort of action as a result, is an entirely different challenge.
Posts on StrategyAudit are all of the latter type.
Ideas come from anywhere, and have been the fodder for posts on StrategyAudit for 15 years. There are ideas everywhere. The most useful are those that come from the challenges being faced by those I interact with in some way. These always force creative thinking, the application of one of many ‘mental models’ I have accumulated over 50 years. They often stimulate a creative perspective on what are often mundane and common problems faced in varying ways by all businesses, so are ‘grounded’ by those real situations.
It seems to come back to the thought expressed by Kevin Kelly in an essay in 2008 thinking of the same challenge, as yet not powered by AI, that all you need is 1000 true fans.
Social platforms set out to prevent you doing that by favouring ‘on platform’ communication, while penalising posts that take a reader away. LinkedIn is very explicit about this. Put in a link to an outside site, and you get stuck in ‘LinkedIn Gaol’, just an algorithmic means of severely limiting the number of feeds your posts are fed to. I have been in LinkedIn gaol for years, the only way to see all I write about is to subscribe on the website.
The only way to grab attention is to deserve it, and have those few who find you to refer to others who might benefit. It is a long game, built one by one.
No AI here, guaranteed organic!!
