There has been a lot of talk here lately at Apollo Media about focus. Streamlining your writing and discussions on your blog seems paramount when establishing a distinctive voice in your work and targeting a core readership that is going to stick around.

The problems with veering off your blog’s direction are clear and also apply to various forms of marketing. If a company strays too far from their tested image, or they try cultivating too many images at once, they can end up confusing potential customers. Is your company targeting young people or old? Do you want to appear authoritative and trustworthy or fresh and cutting-edge? Trying to do or say too many things at once leads to glaring contradictions and a perplexed audience.

Notice how McDonald’s doesn’t blatantly offer pizza or breadsticks on their regular menu? Sure, they could easily introduce them to some success, I think they even had pizza available a decade or so ago, but they are known for the Big Mac and their fries, so being eclectic with their menu just distracts people from what really made them so popular.

Now this little spiel isn’t rallying against variety on your blog. By all means, experimentation is encouraged, especially if you feel that your posts are becoming repetitive or redundant. But you have to stay true to your blog’s initial purpose and intentions. That is why it’s so important to blog about what your passionate about, so you can stick to that passion and avoid drifting off on unintelligible tangents – otherwise your readers will drift off as well. Branding is all about being ‘that’ guy or girl, a resident expert who has taken up space in the real estate of people’s minds.

So stay focused and come to understand what your audience is expecting from you. If you have yet to build your reader base, you want to outline your posting schedule; blog goals and the framework of your articles so you can come into the writing process with a well-conceived and confident approach from the get go. If you want to become a successful blogger, you want to be the come-to person that truly has something valuable to offer. That ‘something’ has to be crystal clear to your readers so that they keep coming back for more!