isvs cultivate your audience

Ian Landsman • January 25, 2006

I think I may have been doing some other ISV's a disservice over the past year. I've preached a lot about having to have a blog and how much blogging has done for my business. Unfortunately, I've left off a big piece of the advice and it's getting some of you into trouble (not that you're only listening to me, but I should have been giving proper advice all along).

See the thing is having a blog isn't enough. Having readers isn't enough. You have to cultivate your readers and a large part of that is responding to their comments. Over the past few months I've begun to notice a trend. I'm leaving comments on blogs and never getting a response from the blog owner. I'm not talking about blogs with tons of readers and 40 comments on every post. I'm talking about blogs that have just started and blogs where most posts have 0 comments.

I check back and check back, but nothing. That of course is discouraging and makes me less likely to read, comment or link over. If you don't have time to respond to a comment when you have only a few comments a week then you're not doing it right. You need to rethink if you want a blog. If you don't cultivate your audience, if you don't participate with them then I think it's unlikely your blog will be successful at driving your other goal.

So if you're going to do it then do it right otherwise you're just wasting time which could be devoted to other matters.