Blogging that doesn’t work

Accountant blogging doesn’t bring new clients but is useful for other reasons.

We often read that business blogs are supposed to help with business marketing. They can build brand identity, familiarity, goodwill, and confidence. My marketing adviser calls this the “know, like, trust factor”. But read more and you’ll learn that technical advice blogs provided by professionals like accountants almost never directly contributes to measurable marketing results. Nobody calls, for example, after reading any of the more than a thousand blog posts here offering helpful technical information. The tens of thousands of annual readers of this blog are not and will never be my clients. My clients have likely never looked at my blog. The exceptions, if any, could be counted on one hand. We call those exceptions to the rule “statistically insignificant “.

So why do it? Why do accountants like me write blogs like the ones here on an almost daily basis? For me, the answer is simple. I use the process of writing the blog to consolidate my understanding of a topic to a level that I am comfortable presenting the topic. Then later, I do actually look at my own blog posts when a question comes up asa tool for quickly bring an issue back into focus. The complexity of the issues facing us today means that nobody can keep all of the relevant information on recall based solely on memory. Using my own writing as a memory jog is far more effective than using a third party resource.