Content reigns supreme, but forced blog entries never end well...

Note: Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and in actuality BIFFANY is great and in no way forced me to write this

Lets face it — people resist doing things that they dont enjoy doing. Often, the end result of forcing someone to do something (like contribute content to your blog/site) is of such poor quality that you would have been better off not making someone post in the first place.

This occurred to me as I hunkered down to post to the Phase2 blog. I wasnt really planning on it (not that I dont enjoy it, I just didnt have any exciting topics meandering through my brain at the time) when a little voice inside my head (lets call her…BIFFANY) struck up an AIM conversation:

BIFFANY (1:40:08 PM): how slammed are you? I really need a blog post—any chance?
me (1:43:36 PM): i dont know, i dont really have any topics saved up
BIFFANY (1:43:45 PM): listen, you are going to write something, and youre going to like it!
BIFFANY (1:43:50 PM): remember doesn’t need to be long
me (1:44:00 PM): yes’m

OK — so that may be an exaggeration, but what happened next is no joke. I sat, staring at my screen, wracking my brain for possible topics, and literally did nothing for about 5 minutes straight. Then, I thought to myself, “why not write an article about how when you google web 2.0 + pants you can actually get decent results!” I even went so far as to write paragraph after paragraph about how great this was.

I was about to press submit when it hit me: this was the worst blog contribution EVER created, and it should be deleted immediately.

I guess what I am getting at is this: so many sites stake their success on how much their visitors enjoy their content enough to continue to return. Before you go down that path, make sure you have a plan to maintain that magical balance between frequent, meaningful content, and pointless, forced dribble.