There is nothing worse than staring at a blank piece of paper. I speak from experience. As I’ve been trying to get in the groove of blogging regularly, the angst of getting started causes me to procrastinate and put off what I know I should do.
Blogging is particularly challenging for start-up companies. You’re wearing 20 different hats, and putting out a blog post seems like the last thing you should be doing.
As I work with small technology companies, I preach the value of blogging. How it’s a great way to develop content and thought leadership. How it helps your SEO efforts. How it’s the hub of your inbound marketing efforts. Yet, even I struggle to practice what I preach.
I decided to approach this as if I were my client. What would I tell myself to do?
Write What You Know
Any student in a Writing 101 class would be given this advice. Think about what you’re currently working on… what you’re passionate about… what’s on your mind. Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about things I see when working with my clients, an interesting event I attended, and a marketing technology acquisition that caught my fancy. Because these were topics that I knew and cared about, it was easy to write about them. I was able to quickly put words on the paper, and then take my time on the editing process.
Take It One Step at a Time
I realized that part of my angst came from setting internal expectations that I would write three posts a week. I really wanted to get my content engine flowing, but I overestimated the time I’d have available to write. As a small business, you’ve got to find clients, service them and ensure that they’re happy.
In my case, I’ve got more work than I can handle at the moment, so spending a lot of time on marketing efforts doesn’t seem to be the best use of my time right now. However, I know that I need to maintain some level of effort as one day, I’m going to be looking for more work. The time I spend blogging now is an investment in future client acquisition.
I’ve reset my expectations on the quantity of posts. If I get one post out a week, I’m happy. And, the funny thing is that now that I’m not pressuring myself, the blog ideas are coming more freely. I’ve even been able to write ahead a bit, and have posts in the queue to publish.
Ask for Help
If you really are too swamped to write, you do have some options. Using paid guest/ghost bloggers is one way to get content written if you’ve got some budget. In my previous positions, I’ve done both. In one instance, I was launching a security blog, and we had no one internally who could commit to writing regularly. I found a terrific consultant with product marketing experience in the security space who ghost blogged for us – essentially writing as if he were our product manager. For a few grand a month, I got 2 posts per week.
In another one of my past roles, we were launching a cloud management blog and needed additional writers to supplement our internal employee writers. We were looking for known names who would help draw their audience to our new blog. We hired a couple of industry experts who blogged under their own bylines. We saw a strong increase in traffic due to these experts blogging on our site, which made it worth the $3K/month investment.
Another option is to ask for unpaid guest bloggers. There are many folks out there who are looking to build their own personal brand, and will write for your blog in exchange for the byline and links back to their site. This is a powerful way to increase your thought leadership as it makes your blog feel even more informative and less self-serving as you’re not the only one writing for it.
The Takeaway
It’s time to give up those excuses that have been keeping you from blogging. You do have something valuable to say. Keep your expectations reasonable, and put time on your calendar each week (30-60 minutes) to write a post. And remember that you do have resources who can help you – you just need to reach out.
Speak Your Mind