Listening To Your Intuition & Trusting Your Blogging Instincts

In the days of old, it was our instincts which kept us alive and our intuition which helped a little too. Today we seem to be conditioned to ignore our instincts and instead behave as we’re conditioned to behave, not as our own internal instincts might often be guiding us.

Have you ever had something on your “To Do” list which has sat there un-done for ages?…something in your gut was telling you not to do it yet (and it wasn’t just laziness).

And then a little later down the line a very good reason has revealed itself that makes you applaud yourself for your fine display of judgment in not doing that thing on your list.

I’ve had that a lot recently when it’s come to all things blogging-related on all my blogs. I’ve always trusted my instincts, they’re usually pretty good and the past few months have been no exception.

Last year I was on somewhat of a mission to get as many chekkies blogging as possible – seeing it as a great way to spread the word about the Paul Chek way of working when it comes to health. The thing I got wrong was the advice about how to use blogging to market what you do.

I believed – as had been my experience – that blogging is a fantastic way to generate buzz, spread the word and even get clients…and that’s what I told everyone (btw – I still believe that). What I didn’t realise however is that there is a very big difference between blogging and *effective* blogging (which I define by how effective your blog is at doing the things you want it to for your business).

Many chekkies simply used it as a platform to say the same messages they’d been saying offline…not realising that blogging is a very different medium and that their offline message wasn’t always as effective as it could have been anyway. This is the case with many small business and is very common amongst life coaches too.

Even being mentioned on some of the bigger blogs can be as useful as a chocolate teapot if the message isn’t quite what you want it to be. Some of my guest posting efforts haven’t maximised the potential benefits as much as they could have done because the message I was giving wasn’t really the message I wanted to be giving…I had an instinct about these at the time but still went with it (who could turn down a guest spot on Problogger, eh?!?).

I’ve come to realise over the past few months as I’ve grown as a professional blogger, that if you really want to use blogging as a way to boost your business and share your message, you’d better trust your instincts, learn how to do it and not just follow the crowd.

BTW “trusting your instincts” also means *not* doing any of the following for a business blog:

• Having an unprofessional-looking blog hosted on blogger (unless you can customise the design yourself)
• Starting a business blog and then neglecting to write on it again
• Failing to learn how to market your blog once you’ve started it up (having a blog is one thing, marketing it effectively is a whole different ball game)

If your instincts are telling you that blogging isn’t as easy as it seems, you’d be right (although it really isn’t that difficult – and any smart business owner will seek the help they need). If your instincts also telling you that generating clients from a blog is also not as easy as it seems…again you’d be right!

Develop good blogging instincts and it will stand in you good stead…listen to them and act accordingly and you won’t go wrong.

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