Why this blog about Steve Jobs is a waste of everyone’s time

Quick answer: Why is blogging about Steve Jobs a waste of time

Writing about Steve Jobs may attract attention, but it is unlikely to attract many of your ideal clients. The subject is broad, the reader’s intent is unclear, and it usually demonstrates Steve Jobs’ expertise rather than your own. For a business blog, more traffic is not automatically better. A handful of relevant readers with problems you can solve may have far more commercial value than a large, loosely interested audience.

Your strongest topics often come from the real questions clients ask when they are under pressure, weighing up a decision or trying to fix something that matters. Answer those questions using your own experience, and you give potential clients useful evidence that you understand their situation. The rest of the article shows how to replace borrowed business wisdom with specific, client-led subjects that demonstrate your expertise and attract better-qualified enquiries.

Perhaps it’s just my feeds, but I can’t scroll through LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook without someone telling me how brilliant Steve Jobs was.

• Five things Steve Jobs taught us about leadership
• What Steve Jobs knew about marketing
• How Steve Jobs turned Apple’s fortunes around
• Watch this Steve Jobs clip before your next meeting.

There appears to be an entire industry devoted to repackaging Steve Jobs.

But if you have a business blog to attract potential clients, writing about Steve Jobs is probably a waste of your time.

Yes, I’m aware that I have put Steve Jobs in the title of this article.

I’m not going to tell you why he was a product genius, brilliant marketer or visionary leader. The internet has comprehensively taken care of that.

I want to look at what happens when businesses borrow familiar stories instead of answering the questions their own clients are asking.

Why Steve Jobs feels like a good business blog topic

Steve Jobs feels close enough to almost any business subject to be useful.

• A marketer can examine how Apple launched its products
• A leadership adviser can discuss his management style
• If you help businesses innovate, out comes the iPhone.

People already know who he is, so his name supplies the story, the drama and a large helping of borrowed authority.

The hope is that some of that authority will rub off on the writer.

Write intelligently about Steve Jobs’ marketing and perhaps readers will assume you are an intelligent marketer. But in most cases, the article proves only that you have read about him and can extract a few business lessons. That is not the same as understanding your clients’ problems.

A useful business blog gives potential clients a taste of how you think, what you understand and what it might be like to work with you. It lets you explain what you have observed, where people tend to go wrong and what you recommend doing differently.

Another retelling of Steve Jobs’ success rarely does that. His experience supplies the evidence and his reputation carries the argument.

You are standing next to his expertise and hoping the reader notices yours.

If someone finishes your article thinking Steve Jobs was brilliant, you have successfully promoted Steve Jobs.

What have they learned about you?

The internet has enough second-hand business wisdom

Steve Jobs is not alone.

There is Kodak and the digital camera. Blockbuster passing on Netflix. Famous leaders making expensive mistakes. They appear in blogs, presentations and LinkedIn posts, usually attached to a simple message: keep innovating, listen to your customers, move with the times.

Fair enough. But enormous business successes and failures are rarely that simple. Once squeezed into a five-point LinkedIn post, most of the complexity quietly disappears.

And if the familiar story is doing all the work, what are you contributing? At some point, second-hand business wisdom becomes white noise.

Broad blog topics can attract the wrong audience

When you are unclear about who an article is for, you may attract a broad mixture of readers who have little connection to your business.

I did some keyword research around an article called The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs. The tool suggested phrases including “leadership jobs”, “business jobs”, “UK jobs” and “IT jobs”.

It does not mean the article ranks for those searches. Nor does it prove that jobseekers are visiting the page. Keyword suggestions are not evidence of rankings or actual traffic.

What they reveal is the subject's ambiguity. The author might think they are writing about leadership. But how much traffic is actually related to that? 

The article itself could interest business students, Apple enthusiasts, people researching famous leaders, or anyone idly browsing stories about business success.

There is nothing wrong with those readers. They’d be ideal if you are running a magazine that's thin on ideas. But if your content needs to attract customers, these readers are unlikely to be the people your business needs to reach.

That is one unintended consequence of choosing a topic without thinking carefully about audience intent. You may attract attention, but you have little control over where it comes from or what those visitors want.

More website traffic does not always mean more business

It is easy to treat website traffic as a score.

More visitors must be better. More clicks mean the blog is working. A graph pointing upwards is always nice to see.

But traffic only has commercial value when at least some of those visitors are relevant to what you do.

At Bit Famous, we don’t sell fruit and veg. We sell higher-value training, coaching and speaking services. I also offer consultancy on digital visibility for your business. We do not need thousands of casual readers with a passing interest in a famous business leader.

A handful of the right people may be far more valuable. And by a handful, I really mean that. Five or six pre-qualified leads created by a targeted business blog that speaks to customer intent.

They do not have to be ready to buy immediately. They may be exploring a problem or working out what sort of help they need. Your expertise has still reached the right person at a relevant moment.

The useful question is not simply, How many people could this article attract?

It is, how many of them might look like my clients?

How do you find business blog topics your clients care about?

Start by putting yourself in the client’s chair.

Not the polished, strategic, boardroom version of the client. The real one. The person sitting at a laptop between meetings, slightly irritated, slightly under pressure and trying to find an answer to a problem that has become too awkward to ignore. Also, they may not have the correct language to identify the help they need. 

That is the moment you need to write for.

Imagine you run a company that washes towels and bed linen for hotels. You may be dealing with rising costs, price competition or customer retention.

Are you asking what Steve Jobs would do about the hotel laundry market?

Probably not.

You might look for ways to explain your pricing to hotel groups or attract independent hotels in a particular region. Those are specific problems in a specific industry.

They might type into Google, "How can I maintain the market share in my commercial laundry business when competitors offer a similar service at a cheaper price?" Still no mention of Steve Jobs.

The same applies when someone searches for a marketing consultant, coach or training provider. Something is happening in their business and they need help.

What does a useful business blog topic look like?

A useful topic identifies a recognisable reader, problem or task and connects it to something you genuinely understand.

The topics on the right give us a much clearer picture of the intended reader. They also allow the writer to explain what they have observed, offer practical advice and demonstrate relevant experience.

The reader learns something useful while discovering how you think.

Is there ever a good reason to blog about Steve Jobs?

Possibly.

If you are writing for business students or an MBA audience, a detailed examination of Apple may be useful. Although I strongly suspect Jobs, Kodak and Blockbuster are already on the reading list.

A familiar story can also help explain a complicated idea. But it should support your argument, not substitute for one. The test is whether it helps answer a real question for a clearly defined reader.

Most of the time, your client’s own problem will give you a better subject.

Stop promoting Steve Jobs and share your own expertise

You do not need to attract every student, Apple enthusiast, jobseeker or bored person scrolling the web.

You need to reach the smaller group of people whose problems you understand and can help solve.

Write about the questions they ask. Use their language. Explain what you have learned from doing the work.

Before publishing, apply one final test:

Does this article answer a real question my ideal client might ask, using expertise that gives them a reason to trust me?

If not, a famous name and a clever headline will not rescue it.

So yes, this blog about Steve Jobs may have been a waste of everyone’s time.

But if it stops you writing another one, perhaps not.