We all start our business blogs with great intentions but then run into the dreaded Blog Blockade:
- “What do you mean I have to write another blog?!” Creating regular, quality blog posts is time-consuming and never lets up.
- “I’ve been staring at an empty blog calendar for an hour.” Blogs are very effective when done as a strategic series. This requires upfront planning and thinking like a publisher — not necessarily on top of an exec’s Favorites list.
- “I wrote the last one, it’s your turn.” Multiple authors relieve some of the frequency pressure but someone has to plan, organize, post and strategize the things.
- “I’m so sick of this topic.” Regularly creating posts with high quality content, SEO, appeal to different buyer personas, are accurate and useful — well, that’s hard.
So is it worth it? It is — blogs are excellent for building brand awareness, thought leadership and soft messaging. It has few hard costs although soft costs are another matter. You can also directly measure traffic and set conversion goals, something many marketing activities can’t offer.There is also SEO for search ranking gold, which increases led gen and can shorten sales cycles.
Altogether business blogging is a very good thing, and will get even better if you can make the challenges less of a problem. I won’t tell you that blogging will suddenly become a breeze. Why should it? Frankly, if lead gen and sales blogging works easily for everyone, doing it well would hardly be a competitive advantage. But there are things you can do to help yourself get better, faster and stronger. In blogging anyway.
- Build the habit by doing it. It gets easier over time. I swear.
- Keep a list of 5 different types of posts. For example, your types could include an infographic, a summary of someone else’s post (with attribution and links!), a numbered list, a corporate or customer story, or an amusing post. (Make sure your audience thinks it’s pretty amusing too.)
- Mix and match. Match one top marketing message with a different format of post. These mixes will give your readers more variety — and you too.
- Build a blog ed calendar. Listing different post types and mixing them with key messages will also help you build your blog ed cal. Think of series and building interest towards new offerings and launches.