I was sorry to read, the other day, that one of the best blogs on the internet is going to archive, and won’t be adding any new content.

For those of you unfamiliar with its brilliance, Regretsy has selflessly trawled the underbelly of the online crafting economy for over 3 years. And it’s done so, so we could laugh, long and hard, at people trying to sell stuff made out of dead things , or that (intentionally or accidentally) looked like human genitalia.

It could be a little, shall we say, blunt at times. But, my word, was it funny!

So, why is such a popular blog, with devoted readers, calling it a day? Well, it’s not because it wasn’t making any money, as creator April Winchell explained to Wired.co.uk:

“It became my job pretty quickly […] And eventually I had to hire a few people, and they had to be paid out of the site as well. So the site had to make money to keep itself alive, and I was able to do that for three and a half years.”

But sometimes, the cost of earning an income just isn’t worth it.

 “You would think that a joke and a photo wouldn’t take that long to crap out, but this site was a time suck like you would not believe. There would be days when I would be on the couch with my laptop for 16 hours, just exhausted and in tears.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Even if you are getting paid for it. And a 16 hour a day blogging commitment doesn’t leave you much time for anything else, like having an actual job, or a relationship, or any other hobbies, or eating and sleeping properly.

“First, you have to find the stuff. And you have find great stuff. […] Then you have to write the joke or do the Photoshop or come up with the contest. You do the coding and resize the images and read hundreds of emails every day […], at one point I was writing four posts a day. I loved every second of it. But you can’t do that forever.”

If you’re catering to a crowd that expects you to post new content 15 times a week – your blog stops being a hobby and starts to become an obligation to your audience. And it’s one thing when that audience is made up of paying and profitable customers and clients, but when they’re only contributing enough to keep the website ticking over, we’re really through the looking glass.

When it comes down to it, doing something well (and Regretsy did things very well) takes time, or it takes money – sometimes it takes both, but there is always a cost involved somewhere. If there wasn’t, there’d be much more good stuff out there, and much less crap. And funnily enough, if that were the case, there’d be no need for Regretsy in the first place.

The question is (as it always is in business) – does the time you spend on something justify the money you save/earn from it? Or is the money you spend on something justified by the time you save?

And, as always, if the answer to either of those questions is ‘no’, then maybe it’s not something that’s worth doing after all.

Of course April’s not deserting the internet, she still has her site, and she produces a weekly webseries called Sockpuppet Theatre. But the difference is that these sites promote her work as a writer and voice actor – the stuff she gets paid for.

You’ve probably never heard of Tim Pritlove, Wikipedia describes him as a German event manager, media artist and discordianist. I know him as the chap behind the really long podcasts, on interesting subjects that I listen to, to help improve my German.

He’s also the poster boy for a digital tip-jar called Flattr.

There’s a good change you’ve never heard of Flattr either (like David Hasslehoff’s music, it’s big in Germany), but you might have heard of the bloke behind it, Peter Sunde.

Not heard of him? Ok, but you’ve certainly heard of his last online venture. A little thing called The Pirate Bay.

Whether you approve of things like The Pirate Bay or not, it’s clear that Peter Sunde knows something about the online economy and the potential of a distributed network.

But let’s back up a bit. With Flattr, you can reward content makers, with actual money, as easily as you would like something on Facebook, or share it to Twitter. You decide how much you want to spend each month – and at the end of the month, that money is split between all the creators of all the pieces of content you have Flattred (or Flattrd, possibly).

Spend £10, Flattr 100 things, and your £10 is split 100 ways. Spend £50 and Flattr 2 things, and each of them gets £25 (minus the Flattr processing fee). You can subscribe to people and Flattr them a small amount each month, and you can Flattr them just for being them, on their account profile on Flattr.com.

Simple, eh?

These kind of micro-payments and tip jars have been tried before, of course. The problems associated with trying to get people to pay for stuff that they can get for free have been well documented . And Flattr is just one of a range of services cropping up that do similar things, including offerings from Google and PayPal.

So why be so interested?

Well, because it seems to be working (up to a point).

As of last May, Tim Pritlove was getting more than €2500 a month from Flattr, that’s over £2,000 in gbp. Ok, it’s not enough to retire on, but it’s money that people are paying for otherwise-free content. And it’s not just new content that people are Flattring, even podcasts dating back to 2005 have a handful of Flattrs.

You can read more about the figures over at his blog(It’s in German, but those nice people at Google will translate it into not-bad English for you if you need them to). But the secret to his success may have something to do with that last point of mine.

He’s been putting out his podcast since 2005. A few days ago he released the 200th episode – a 3hr conversation about urban planning with a German architect. As of today it already has 95 Flattrs.

(Think about that for a second. There are at least 95 people in the world who are happy to spend money to reward people who produced a 3hr podcast about the history of urban planning and its future challenges.)

But the CRE Podcast had released well over 100 episodes before Flattr ever came along. Episodes including:

• Taxes  (released Feb 2010 and now with 48 Flattrs)
• Coffee – (April 09, now with 90 Flattrs)
• Typography – (March 08, now with 15 Flattrs)

Like most podcasts, they were happy to accept donations via paypal etc, but there wasn’t any expectation that the listeners should donate. And I suspect if Flattr went away tomorrow, Tim would still find interesting people to have interesting conversations with, and put them out there for us to enjoy. Because he’s not trying to “monetize his podcast”, he’s trying to produce the best podcast he can.

One side-effect of that is that people like to give him money – hurray for people!

Does this mean you can just add Flattr buttons to your business or personal blog and start watching the money roll in? Of course not – Tim Pritlove is an outlier (almost by definition a poster-boy is going to be an outlier).

But he’s not an outlier by chance alone, he’s there because he’s put the work in. And when you’re drowning in an ever-growing ocean of new content, finding something of real quality can feel like a refreshing glass of drinking water.

So, if you spend your time producing incredibly high quality content on your blog, with no expectation of monetary reward, and you attract an audience of people who appreciate the time and effort that you put in, to provide them with great stuff, that they can’t get just anywhere else, and that they would miss if it went away, you might be able to make some money from Flattr or other micro-payment systems.

Hey, I said it was possible, I never said it would be easy.

I’ve spent 2 posts – and well over 1500 words so far – in the hope that I can convince you that trying to monetize your blog is stupid, and that the money “in blogging” isn’t actually in blogging at all.

So, given that I seem to have some strong opinions on the subject, why am I going to blog about blogging (for a bit)?

I’m doing it because I believe you can get real, tangible, bottom line benefits from blogging. And I believe the businesses that would benefit most from blogging are being poorly served by all the talk of keywords, affiliate links, and product launches.

I believe you can use your blog to improve the way you do business – but I don’t believe it’s a magic bullet that can replace the rest of your marketing.

Your blog can be a central, integrated part of your online (and offline) marketing and content strategy – if you have one of those. Or, if you don’t, a blog can be a great place to start.

But hang on just one shiny second. If I’m blogging about blogging, am I not in danger of turning into the very thing I’ve just been railing against?

Lordy, I hope not. I’m neither a blogger nor a pro-blogger – I’m a content specialist, with a blog. I’m not going to talk about how you can make money from your blog, I’m not even going to talk about how you can use your blog to make money for your business.

I’m going to talk about the way a blog can engage with, and delight, your customers – how blogging can help build trust, and loyalty amongst your clients – and how even the most ‘boring’ businesses can blog well.

Y’know, the content stuff.

(Yes, I know there’s a slightly incongruous graphic of a naked man playing tennis in the middle of this post. But, honestly, I couldn’t think of a better graphic, and I have real trouble resisting puns and wordplay. Anyway, in case anyone is wondering, yes, there are more images in that sequence, yes, they do show other angles, and yes, of course you can have a link)

Yesterday I promised you an explanation as to why I think trying to monetize your blog is a silly idea, so here it is.

Follow the money

There’s pretty much 2 ways to generate an income from your blog.

1. Sponsors, adverts and affiliate links.

Ad supported media has a long history – there have been adverts in The Times newspaper every day since it first rolled off the press in 1788. Offline ad rates depend on the potential reach of the publisher or broadcaster, their circulation and audience figures – the keyword here being potential.

Advertisers can put money into design and copy and pay for placement, but after that, it’s all a bit of a mystery. There’s no accurate way of knowing how many people actually looked at the adverts, let alone acted on, or were influenced by them.

John Wanamaker famously (or at least anecdotally) said “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

All that changes with the internet.

With advanced tracking and analytics, advertisers can tell how many times an advert is shown on a screen, how many people click it, where they come from, and sometimes where they go next.

Advertisers stopped paying for adverts on a ‘per issue’ basis and started paying for them ‘per click’ or ‘per impression’. Not only had it become much easier to see what was working and what wasn’t, advertisers only had to pay for the stuff that worked.

Great for the advertisers – less good for the publishers.

Instead of selling 12 month subscriptions to their newspapers and magazines, publishers suddenly found that they had to sell every single story and every single page. Keywords, links and traffic became vitally important, as publications stopped simply displaying adverts, and became the first trackable step of someone else’s sales funnel.

So what does this mean for the adverts on your blog?

Well, essentially it means your income comes from selling eyeballs to advertisers. You are the digital equivalent of a brightly coloured fly on the end of a fishing rod. You are being paid to get the attention of as many people who might click the links on your site as possible.

There’s nothing, necessarily, wrong with that. But it’s worth remembering that, with a pay-per-click revenue model, you only get paid when people leave your site. You are not making money from blogging, you are making money from selling clicks.

2. Selling any other product or service

Whether you’re a butcher, a baker, or an e-candlestick maker – the thing people pay you for is the thing that makes you money. Your blog is a way to get people’s attention, keep their attention, build loyalty, tell them about products, and so on. It is not the thing that people are paying you for.

But, but, pro-bloggers.

This is where we have a bit of category confusion. Pro-bloggers make money from selling eyeballs to advertisers, and by selling products and services, just like anyone else.  The difference is, they are selling the same tools that they are using, blogging.

And here’s the kicker – if you’re a pro-blogger, you have a very specific target market – people who want to learn how to blog, either for pleasure or for money (usually for money).

If you’re not a pro-blogger, and you have a different product or service to sell (or a different set of advertisers to find eyeballs for) then you have a different target market.

There is no guarantee that what attracts the first market will also attract the second. There’s a reason that Bulgari and Bargain Booze don’t market themselves in the same way.

Bloggers, who blog about blogging, who tell you how to blog, so you can make oodles of money from your blog, are great at attracting people who want to learn how to make money from their blog.

They’re not necessarily great at attracting people who want a plumber, or find a reliable accountant, or book a weekend away at a cottage.

After a while, the people who want to make money blogging catch on to this, and they too start to blog about blogging. After all, that’s what’s working for those other guys.

Maybe they put together an ebook about how to build your subscription list, or they offer a course on writing killer landing pages – or maybe they just have adverts for other pro-bloggers’ products.

And why shouldn’t they? After all, they’ve been around for a while, they’ve bought all the products, they’ve seen how it works. And while they might not ever reach the dizzy heights of their idols (who they’re probably paying $39.97 a month for access to their “super-inner-circle”  membership site), they’ve got valuable information to pass on to people who are new to the whole ‘make money online’ thing.

And so, inevitably, it has turned into a massive blogging Ponzi scheme, with each new blogger feeding the more established bloggers, buying ebooks about how to make money blogging, and so on, and so on, and so the loop continues.

There must be some exceptions though? Right?

Of course, some people do make money by blogging, but they’re writing blogs for other people to put on their websites: either ghost blogging, or guest blogging, or by having a job as a staff writer.

Those people aren’t pro-bloggers, they’re writers. And the people that they are writing for aren’t making money blogging either, they make money by selling eyeballs to advertisers, or selling some other product or service (is this sounding familiar yet).

So, no. You can’t make money from your blog, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell something to you.

So, why, after all that, am I going to be blogging about blogging (for a bit)?

Y’know what – I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Did you know that 79% of all blog posts on the internet are about the subject of blogging?

It’s absolutely true! Well, it might be, I actually just made that statistic up. But whatever the true number, it’s a lot – A LOT.

The internet is verily chockablock with bloggers blogging about blogs for bloggers who also blog about blogging and blogs. If you think about it for too long it starts to look like a drawing by M.C. Escher, or one of those spinning spirals that draw you in until you are so dizzy that you just fall over.

You see, blogging about blogging is a great way to get people to read your blog, because (and here comes another made up statistic) 64% of all searches on Google are some variation of the question “how can I make money from my blog?”

And there’s a simple answer to that question, but it’s not one that many people will talk about – so I’m putting on my ruby slippers, and pulling back the curtain, to reveal the answer to the eternal question of “how to make money from your blog”

… you can’t.

No, really. With a few very, very, very, very, specific exceptions (of which you are not one) you can’t make money from your own blog.

“But hang on”, I hear you say, “what about all these rockstar bloggers, and pro-bloggers that I keep hearing about? Surely they’re making money from their blogs aren’t they?”

Well, no, they aren’t. They may be making a lot of money, and they may have a blog, but what they aren’t doing is making money from their blog.

Let me explain.

You or I (or anyone else) make money when we have something that someone else is willing to buy from us. That something may be time, or information, or a product or a skill, but the fundamentals of economics remain – money is a way of trading things that people value.

If your blog is on the internet, and not behind a paywall (yup, that’s one of the very, very, very, specific exceptions there) then your blog is available to anyone who wants to read it, for free. It doesn’t matter whether you have 10 readers a month or 10,000,000 – no-one is paying you to write your blog. You are not making money blogging.

But of all the blogs about blogging on the internet, approximately 87%  of them (or, y’know, some other number) offer tricks and tips to monetize your blog. Here’s a picture of what that looks like in the real world.

Trying to monetize your blog is like trying to monetize your yellow pages listing, or monetizing the sales letters you send out to your loyal customers, or monetizing the window display at the front of your shop.

A good yellow pages ad will get you more phone calls than a bad yellow pages ad, a good window display will get more people through your door than a bad window display, a good sales letter will get you more orders than a bad sales letter.

But no-one makes money just by having a nice window display, or just by taking out a yellow pages ad, or just by sending sales letters (trust me on this one, I used to run a gorgeous, and fantastically unprofitable, art gallery – yellow pages ad, sales letters and all.)

So, where is all this money in blogging coming from, where is it going, and what is it being spent on?

That’s a good question – I’ll tell you what I think tomorrow.

Free Communication Skills Courses available in Liverpool.

Does anyone in (or near) Liverpool fancy a day’s free training? I’ve got a couple of courses in development that need a bit of beta testing, in front of a live audience. Which means, while these courses will eventually be available for around £850 a day, you can take advantage of the almost finished product, for absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.

Okay, there are couple of catches:

1. The course date for the first course is coming up really soon – February 11th (it’s a Monday). I know this is the start of half-term in Liverpool, but it’s the only time, I can do this course run-through.
2. At the end of every course, there’s always a feedback form to be filled in. This course is no different, but it’s even more important for me to be able to get as much feedback as possible. So if you come along, I’d like you to think about how the course works, as well as what you’re learning.
3. As the title says, while the training is free for the day, I can’t go so far as to provide any lunch. So, I’m afraid you’ll have to buy your own sandwiches. Although, I will bring plenty of biscuits with me, and there will be all the tea and coffee you can drink.

Course 1 is a general communication skills course. It looks at the processes that drive communication, how things happen the way (and why), and what you can do to communicate more effectively. (Feb 11^th).

Course 2 is a day of training to help you deal with the press, and learn some basic PR skills. It’s aimed at people who don’t do PR as their main job, or on a day to day basis (date tbc in March).

Both courses are tailored to people who work in the non-profit sector: in charitable organisations, social and sports groups, voluntary organisations, and so on.

However, the fundamental building blocks of communication don’t change from job to job.

So, even if you work in a multinational organisation, or a small entrepreneurial start-up, or you’re retired, or a student with no lectures that day, you’ll still be able to make use of what you learn on the day.

These are full day training courses. Starting at 9:30 (if you can get there by 9:15 that would be brilliant) and finishing around 4:30. The training venue is in Central Liverpool.

And places are limited, so please let me know as soon as possible if you want to come along, either via the contact form, or through twitter.

There’s quite a few of these courses in development, so if you are interested in helping me test any others over the next few months let me know, and I will keep you up-to-date with the details.

Brand new colour scheme? – check
New header? – check
New approach to work? – check
New pricing structure? – check
New Pages? – check
New images? – check

All in all, there’s a lot of new stuff on this site – and hopefully you’ll agree that it’s more focused, more interesting, and a little bit more me than it was before.

What I haven’t tackled just yet, is this corner – the blog. Such a simple word – such a complicated thing.

Because, in 2012, what is a blog? What makes a blog different from a new section, or a column, or a cookbook, or a magazine?

Or a photo album, or a scrapbook, or a jobs board, or a page of testimonials?

Or a text book, or a social club, or a specialist retailer, or a tv show?

A blog could be any of these things, or all of them! But none of these things, on it’s own, defines what a blog is – or should be.

What this blog should be (or whether it should be at all) is going to take a little more thought.

Trying to engage with Oreo’s Daily Twist campaign leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth.

I can be a real glutton for punishment sometimes. I was back on the Oreo daily twist site today, after writing about it a few days ago. I was on the desktop site, and my eye was drawn to the “suggest your Twist” button. You may remember that on the desktop site, but not on the mobile site, you’re invited to share a newsworthy topic to inspire the next daily twist, and there’s a nice big friendly button to you to click.

If you’re expecting it take you to a contact form where you can leave your suggestion your gonna be sorely disappointed. It actually takes you to the OREO Moments page, where you can share your OREO Moments with the world.

If you’re confused at this point, you can be forgiven. There’s no mention of the Daily Twist campaign on this site at all. And if you go to hit the back button, to take you back to the daily twist site, you discover that, to compound things, they’ve ‘broken the back button’ by opening this new website in a new tab. This goes against web usability guidelines for several reasons.

So you go back to the original tab for a clue about what you should do, and on closer reading the micro-copy says ”Share a newsworthy topic in the OREO Moments Gallery and you might inspire our next daily twist!”. So, okay, what you have to do is share a newsworthy topic.

So you head back to the new tab, and look for the words newsworthy topic. Which you don’t find, because they’re not on the page either. But you do see the word share, so we’re getting somewhere. “Share your favourite OREO photos videos and stories with us and we’ll share them with the world” – not quite the same thing as suggesting a twist, but let’s see what happens when we click “get started”.

Ah yes, the obligatory Facebook login, which by default will let Oreo automatically post things to your Facebook timeline. By this point I’m really pretty annoyed, but I set the privacy levels to something I’m comfortable with (in other words notifications only appear to me, not to anybody else, and they can’t post on my behalf) and login.

After logging in I’m taken to a form where I can submit my Oreo moments. It may be worthwhile reminding you at this point that we didn’t come here to submit an Oreo moment, we came here to suggest a newsworthy topic for a daily twist.

The form says “love Oreo? Don’t keep it yourself. Add your story, photo or video for all to see.”

It may be worthwhile reminding you of this point again, that we didn’t come here to share our love of Oreo with the world either, we came here to suggest a newsworthy topic for daily twist.

But let’s carry on for now.

Step one involves four separate actions:

1. Choose whether I’m getting share my story my picture on my video
2. add an audio moment title,
3. categorise my Oreo moment (daily twist isn’t one of the options available),
4. and either upload my video or photo, or add my story.

At this point I begin to suspect that they don’t actually care about my suggestion for a daily twist, but I make the suggestion in the ‘story box and click ‘next’ –  and we’re taken to step two.

Step two is where I get to give them my name and email address, to tell them what country I’m in and give them my postcode.

I also get to tick a box to confirm that I am over 18, and another to agree to some terms and conditions – which presumably give Kraft Food the right to turn my Oreo moment into a heartwarming advertising campaign without consulting me, asking me, or paying me any money.

I say presumably, because I don’t know. I didn’t read the terms and conditions, I didn’t take the box, and this is where my attempt to suggest a newsworthy topic for a daily twist ends.

Way to make it easy there Oreo.

There’s a lot to like about Oreo’s daily twist campaign, but ultimately it ends up being little more than empty calories.

Being a globally recognised product has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand everybody knows what an Oreo cookie is like – we’re familiar with its shape and colour, with the filling sandwiched between two chocolate cookies.

That’s great for brand recognition – in many people’s minds a cookie is an Oreo cookie.

But it is what it is, and there’s only so many times you can show someone taking apart a cookie, dunking it in milk, sharing it with someone, and then eating it. When you’ve already got a list of ‘65,000 ways to use an Oreo cookie in your pudding’, you know you need a new approach to keep your product social.

Which is why, in many ways, the Oreo daily twist campaign is so bloody brilliant.

It takes the iconic elements of the Oreo cookie (combined with a glass of milk and a straw) and uses them to create a single, simple image, which encapsulates the day in the news, or on social media.

So on September 13 the Oreo cookie takes the place of the ‘O’ in Robert Indiana’s well-known ‘LOVE’ graphic, to celebrate his birthday. The day before that the cookie is carved into the shape of an iPhone to mark the announcement of the iPhone Five.

Some twists are perennial, like the twist from August 29 marking the start of the new school term. Some are unpredictable and viral with an incredibly short lifespan. The twist from August 30 has a cookie that is half chocolate and half plain, to represent the photo of Venus the two-faced cat that intrigued the Internet that day.

It’s a smart strategy, it means they can plan certain bits of content well in advance, and still be able to react and respond to the day’s events if something better comes up.

And, because it’s a daily twist, they can tap into different demographic groups, segments and micro-niches, in a way that a broader marketing advertising campaign couldn’t. Whether you’re interested in football, or NASCAR, or fashion, or space travel, or television, or politics, or food, or celebrity, or language and music, or science and nature, technology, or culture, or history, or family, or film, there’s a twist for you

The daily twist site is clean and simple to use. The desktop version makes it easy to Pin an image, Tweet, or Like a twist on Facebook. You can also add a comment using the Facebook social plug-in and post that Facebook. And you can share a newsworthy topic that could inspire the next daily twist.

The Tumblr-like mobile version gives you fewer options, restricting you to the ability to Like or Tweet – but the interface is beautiful and clean and makes brilliant use of white space and a one-page scrolling site.

Both versions make it incredibly easy for you to share that day’s bite-sized, daily twist treat. But they don’t make it easy to engage on a deeper level.

The mobile site is so Tumblr-like that I originally thought it was actually a Tumblr site. When I went to search for it, to do the research for this post, the first site Google offers me is oreodailytwist.tumblr.com. But that is not the official site, the daily twists aren’t posted daily, nor do they appear in chronological order.

No, the official site isn’t a Tumblr. It’s at www.brands.Nabisco.com/Oreo/dailytwist/mobile – that’s a sub domain, of a sub domain, of a sub domain, of a sub domain.

And there’s no way to get to the full site from the mobile site. So if I’m on my phone, I can’t Pin today’s twist or comment on it, even if I want to.

As the mobile site is the default for viewing the site on the iPad as well as on a phone this seems frankly barking. Even the copyright link at the bottom of the page doesn’t link back to Kraft foods homepage, and the Oreo daily twist banner at the top of the page doesn’t take you anywhere. The only thing you can do from the mobile site is Like or Tweet.

In fact it’s worse than that. If you do hit the Tweet button, your Tweet looks something like this…

August 30 – Two-Faced Cat brands.nabisco.com/oreo/dailytwis…

— Lydia Bates (@lydiajo) September 19, 2012

An un-shortened link that still manages to be truncated, cropping the last letter of the word ‘twist’ and burying the recognisable brand Oreo in the middle of the link. Hardly the most enticing tweet in the world.

And if you click on the link from a mobile device (including a tablet) not only does it take you to the mobile site, but it takes you to the top of the mobile site not to the twist that was actually tweeted.

Why it insists on tweeting the link to page and doesn’t post the image directly to twitter in the first place I have no idea.  This distinction matters because it’s forcing you to share the site and not just the image – but the site is almost nothing more than the image.

For the daily twist to work the audience need to understand the frame of reference. And if they don’t know them already, there’s no way for them to find out – will least not easily from the site.

Take the twist from August 21: celebrating a comedy legend. I have absolutely no idea what story this is a twist of*. I know the August 27 twist: celebrating an American hero, marks the death of Neil Armstrong, so I might assume by the choice of language that the August 21 twist is similarly marking the death of a famous comedian. But which one? Oreo’s daily twist doesn’t give me any more information. No link to Wikipedia, no link to a news story – you don’t even get a ‘tooltip‘ when you hover over the image.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Oreo has a responsibility to educate the Internet, or to provide in-depth commentary. But by keeping the level of engagement on such a shallow footing, what could’ve been a really enjoyable experience instead becomes something sweet but ultimately unfulfilling. You have to look elsewhere for anything of substance.

It just seems like a missed opportunity to me.

* It was Phyllis Diller’s twist, the actress and comedian famous her rapid fire wit and incorrigible laugh. It doesn’t feel like a mark of respect to force me to Google “which comedian died on August 21?” to find that out.

For – the three letter word you should pay more attention to.

Often, when we talk about content, marketing, branding, or positioning, we talk about the W’s.

Who, what, why, when, which, and how (yes, I know, strictly speaking, that last one doesn’t start with a w).

What is the product? Who is the target market? Where do our customers live, why should they buy from us? And so on.

All good questions, all important questions.

But you could come up with answers to these questions all day and all night without finding anything of real value, if you forget that in almost every question there is an implied ‘for’.

When you ask ‘What is the product?’, you’re asking ‘What is the product for?’

‘Who is the target market?’ means ‘Who is the product or service for?’

And it goes on, why is it for them? How do they know it’s for them? When will they realise it’s for them?

Marketers call this the features and benefits distinction. You don’t sell mop with a wooden handle and an absorbent sponge head – you sell the promise of a clean floor, and free time do what you want instead of scrubbing the kitchen.

Sometimes it’s referred to by the letters WIIFM – what’s in it for me? Which essentially means ‘why should anybody give a shit about your product/service/page/business/blog post?’

For takes you beyond the surface demographic questions and takes you towards meaning and purpose. It’s what connects your product/service/page/business/blog post with your customer/prospect/client/user/target market.

The meaning of for

According to the copy of Collins Compact Dictionary that I’ve had since I was 12 years old, the preposition for has a number of definitions:

Intended to reach, directed or belonging to, because of, instead of, towards, on account of, in favour of, respecting, during, in search of, in payment of, in the character of, in spite of.

Other dictionaries include additional definitions including XYZ.

Is it any wonder that we sometimes find communication difficult with this level of ambiguity?

Because, when you’re determining who/what/why something is for, the definition of for that you use can be as important as the choice of pronoun at the start of the question.

The answer to the question ‘who is this product intended to reach?’ may be very different to the answer to the question ‘who is this product in favour of?’, or ‘who is this product because of’.

But if you can answer all of those questions you will have a much better understanding of your product/business/service/page/content; better insight into your client/customer/prospect/user; and a much better opportunity to find ways to connect one to the other.