In my opinion, absolutely every business should be blogging. But there are a staggering number of businesses who still aren’t making use of this amazing tool for their marketing, and I wanted to know why. I looked back at all the conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs who love the idea of a blog but haven’t taken the plunge, and I realised lots of people give the same few reasons for not doing it. I also realised that most of those reasons were rubbish, and so today I’m taking you through the 5 main ‘barriers’ to blogging I come across, and why they aren’t barriers at all.
I Don’t Need To
If this is where your mind went, I want to ask you one thing. Why not?
If it’s because you’re too busy, you have enough customers to get along with or no one else in your industry is doing it, you’re wrong. If you’re too busy, you can always outsource it. If you have enough customers now, don’t you want to make sure you still have enough new customers in the future? And if no one else in your industry is doing it, then you definitely should, because you will become the voice of authority in that industry very quickly.
Blogs are one of the most trusted forms of marketing material out there, and they’re a great source of web traffic, warm leads and client engagement. They also boost your search engine ranking, so you’ll be displayed in search results above your competitors, and they give you a chance to showcase your unique brand voice, your style and your approach. In the world of people buy people your brand needs a personality, and blogs are the best way to show it.
I Don’t Know What To Write About
This is by far the most common comment I get when I start talking about regular blogging, and it drives me mad. Simply because it’s about as untrue as it gets. Every single business out there has hundreds if not thousands of topics they could blog about – it’s just about unlocking the idea fountain. Take it from me, I’ve written over 500 blogs about shredding paper!
To prove it, here’s a little exercise for you. First I want you to book 1 hour in your diary for blog planning. No distractions or trying to squeeze it in between other things. You need just 1 hour to focus here. Next, do the following:
- Brainstorm. Put your business name in the middle of a page and write down absolutely everything you can think of to do with your business. EVERYTHING.
- Look at your FAQs. Write down things your customers always ask you about. These are a goldmine of content ideas and provide real value to readers too.
- Talk to some people. They could be your clients, your friends, your family or other business owners. Just ask them what they would like to know about, or what questions they have about your profession.
- Check the calendar. What special dates are there that you could theme a blog around? Holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Easter and Christmas are a good place to start, but what else is there? For example, March 4th is National Grammar Day, so I wrote this fun little blog about the word ‘And’.
- Google it. Google is one of the most underrated tools on the planet when it comes to blogging. Spend a few minutes Googling some common terms for your industry and you’ll get hundreds of new ideas for blogs. You can also use tools like Answer The Public, which lets you type in a keyword and tells you all of the searches people really made about it.
But It Means Giving Information Away For Free!
Yes, that’s kind of the point. And it’s not a bad thing! The idea with blogs is to show your prospects that you really know your stuff, and part of that is explaining how to handle certain situations, work through common problems and showcase all of that wonderful knowledge you keep locked up in your brain.
Think of it like you’re explaining your industry to your in-laws – you want them to know what it is you do and why it benefits people, but they don’t necessarily want to go into the nitty-gritty details and inner workings while they’re over for Sunday lunch. My aunt (who was an undertaker) once explain to me how she’d removed the toe from a cadaver that had got stuck in the tap while she was over for dinner, and I’ve never been able to look at salmon the same way again. Spare the gory details and focus on the what’s, why’s and how’s.
The concern for most people comes at the end. They worry that they will have given so much information away that the reader will go off and do it themselves. Yes, sometimes that will happen. But more often than not you’ll get people reaching out to you off the back of your blog posts, wanting to learn more. They’ll see your tips and advice, maybe even try one or two out, but quickly realise they can’t do it alone. They need all of that expertise to do it right, and because you shared that information, you’re the one they go to.
Isn’t It Too Much To Write?
Whenever I’m asked the ideal length for a blog post, people go a bit wide-eyed when I say ‘700-1000 words’. It seems like a lot, I know! But the thing is, it’s not, especially if you split your 1000 word blog out into sections (as you should be doing). Then, you only need to write 5 sections of 200 words each. 1 of those is the introduction and 1 is the conclusion, so you only need to write 600 words of main content, with 200 words per point. If you’re writing a 700-word blog, then that’s just 300 words of main content, which is about a quarter of an A4 page, or roughly 1.5 minutes of normal speaking. And I guarantee you can talk for 1 and a half minutes about what you do.
If you struggle to fit in the time to do this on a regular basis, I’m a firm believer in batch-writing. This is where you schedule 1 day a month to do nothing but write blogs, rather than doing one per week and losing half a day to it. Writing blogs in batches is often a way to get 3 or 4 blogs out of one topic, and it means you’re using your time in the most efficient way.
But I Hate Writing!
Ok, I concede this one. There are lots of different reasons people hate writing. Some find it very time-consuming; others find it boring or just frustrating. I know some people who hate writing because they struggle with dyslexia, or their first language isn’t English and so writing in English is very difficult. These are all valid, and I will never tell you otherwise.
What I will tell you is that it does get easier with time. It’s like any other skill, the more you practice it the faster and better you get. So if you’re frustrated that it takes you ages to write a blog that isn’t very good, keep at it. Every blog will be better than the last, and will take slightly less time to write.
If there are other reasons you hate to write, don’t let that stop you from having a business blog. If you have others in your business, ask them if they would like to write blogs for the website. You’ll often find someone with a love of writing in your team, so why not let them do the thing they enjoy? Or if it’s just you, consider hiring a copywriter to write blogs for you. People like me can craft expertly written blog posts in your own voice and style, so no one but us needs to know you didn’t write them.
If you’ve got this far, congratulations! You should be out of excuses not to blog for your business. So now it’s time to put some things into practice. If you’re free on the 21st of June, come along to my Blogging for Business 101 workshop, where you can learn everything you need to know about blogging. From overcoming writers’ block to topic generation, blog structure, research and even how to upload and publish your blogs, it’s the perfect workshop for someone who wants to blog but doesn’t know where to start.
Book your tickets here, and use code BLOGNERD for 15% off!