Blogging can produce a whole host of benefits for a company. It’s a tremendous way to score points with Google, from the keywords in your posts to the simple fact that your website is frequently updated. A blog is also one of the best forums for sharing your cutting-edge ideas and establishing yourself as a thought leader. What’s more, if you allow your audience to comment on your posts, that’s a great opportunity to engage with them.
All that said, there are still many companies that feel blogging is not for them. While every organization has its own list of reasons for that opinion, they often include:
- Blog posts take too much time to write.
- Nobody reads blogs.
- I wouldn’t know what to write about anyway.
- It’s not critical right now; I’ll get to it at some point.
Well, if you look through our extensive blog archive, you’ll see that we wholeheartedly disagree! Allow me to explode these common blogophobic myths.
- Time — This one has a stranglehold on many companies due to a couple other misconceptions: that blog posts must be long and they must be eloquent. WRONG on both counts. The point of a blog post is typically to inform, entice, or amuse. The length or eloquence of a post has no bearing on this. Sure, it should be long enough to warrant the click-through and be free of grammatical errors, but beyond that, it’s the information and the impact that matters.
- Readership — Nobody reads them? Au contraire! It’s not uncommon for a blog to be one of the most visited, if not THE most visited page of a website. And, when posts contain links to other key pages on a site, the blog can also be the site’s most effective launchpad for further exploration.
- Ideas — Every blog page that is created comes with a powerful resource for generating post ideas—it’s called the internet! No, you should not plagiarize other people's work, but being inspired by it to write a similar post is perfectly fine. And spending some time creating a nice long list of topics in advance means you don’t have to both brainstorm an idea and write the text in one sitting. Just pick an idea from the list, and perhaps a buyer persona to slant it toward, and go to town!
- Importance — If you think a blog can wait until you get around to it, please go back and reread the first paragraph of this post. There is SO much to be gained from regular blogging. The longer you wait to get started, the more potential business you are leaving on the table.
So… sharpen your digital pencil and get to work. You’ve got a hungry audience out there just waiting for your first post!