Your blog is a shark. Seriously.

Even though blogging has been around considerably longer than most of the internet marketing tools we now classify broadly as “social media,” there are still a lot of misconceptions about how to maintain a winning blogging strategy. But it turns out that I have a come up with a great analogy to help explain the importance of blog maintenance: your blog is a shark.

A healthy shark represents nature’s most perfect predator blending, speed, strength, stealth, intelligence and agility with about 3,000 of the sharpest teeth you’ll find this side of a Cuisinart. Sharks rule the underwater food chain and their attack strategies always stay sharp and fresh because they literally have new teeth coming in every week or so.

Bloggers have similar advantages. A healthy blogging strategy will allow a business owner to create the perfect blend of quality content, web updates, social media, search engine optimization, email marketing and more while expending relatively little effort. And, like shark’s teeth, new blog posts come in every week creating a steady stream of new marketing weapons.

But, by the same token, bloggers and sharks also have the exact same weakness: if they stop, they die. It’s true, just ask Wikipedia: many sharks need to remain in perpetual motion to ensure that water passes properly through their gills. If these sharks were to stop swimming, they would suffocate.

If a blogger stops blogging, their marketing suffocates. Social media efforts become labored. You lose the search engine optimization benefits that come with frequent updates. Your monthly email newsletters will devolve into a bi-monthly or quarterly effort: after all, writing an email newsletter every month is easy when you have about 2,000 words of original content to draw from (based on an average of 500 words per week and four weeks per month).

If you want to keep your internet marketing machine running smoothly, you need to feed it content constantly. If you plan well, if you stay disciplined, your marketing will thrive.

The next time you visit someone’s website and see that their blog hasn’t been updated in weeks or months, remember these two words: dead shark.