Essay-sites instead of blogs

Posted: June 5th, 2011

I think there is a certain set of blogs out there that need to be repositioned. For reference purpose, let’s call this set of blogs the professional essay blog or essay-site for short. My own essay-site, derrekpearson.com, fits into this category.

Essay-sites generally have these characteristics

• They currently call themselves blogs, but should position themselves as essay-sites.
• They are written by professionals from a variety of industries.
• The writing is sporadic. They don’t publish on a regular basis and sometimes they won’t publish anything for large stretches of time (months or even years).
• They don’t have regular readers.
• They are referenced for their high quality content. Usually only a specific essay (blog post) is referenced.
• They often act as a supplement to the modern day professional resume.

Why essay-sites instead of blogs

I struggled with my own blog for a long time. I was in this half-way place. I was trying to make it something that was unattainable for me, because that’s what I thought I had to do.

The idea of current, regularly updated content is inherent in the original concept of a blog. I knew I had something to say and I naturally gravitated to the blog structure and concept. So, that’s how I got started. In the beginning, the first couple of weeks, it was fine. I averaged a post a week. Not bad. However, that quickly changed as I became engrossed in day to day life and found little time for regular updates. It’s a nice thought, but it’s not going to happen for me.

To compensate for my lack of time to create my own unique content I started doing what a lot of people do on blogs. I began curating other people’s interesting content and posting it on my blog as filler. The stuff in between my actual unique content. There are already very popular sites that due this much better than I ever could. Further, new sites like LinkedIn Today are using social media algorithms to automate this. This is a much better tactic for providing curating services to the community than an individual like myself trying to hand curate. More importantly, when I was doing this, I wasn’t adding any original content to the web. I was just re-hashing content.

So, as I began to realize what I was actually doing I re-evaluated my approach. I faced up to the facts that the time I could devote to writing useful content was sporadic and that wasn’t going to change. Further, the content I was writing remained of value for a prolonged period of time and is useful on an educational level. At it’s best, it is referenced and shared across the web.

So, I stripped out all my blog posts that were not original content. I stopped calling this a blog and started positioning it as a set of essays that have useful information in them. It’s helping me focus my efforts on something that provides value. Overtime, I plan on adding useful features to make the essays easy to share.

I think this situation holds true for a lot of people. For folks like me, I say we should embrace this, rather than try to fight it. The concept of a blog does not properly describe the nature of our content or the frequency of it. Thus, I am positioning my site as a collection of essays and I am proposing that many current blogs would be better off doing the same.

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