Top 3 Corporate Blogging Excuses

So your expansion stage management teams have decided to prioritize corporate blogging as a key component of your firm’s content marketing strategy. Fifty percent of your firm loves the idea. The other 50% of your firm wants nothing to do with it. Based on my experience as the blogging administrator, and speaking with other “blog bosses” at our portfolio companies, here are the top 3 excuses I can assure you will start hearing from a good portion of your company if you set content delivery deadlines… and of course a few rebuttals!

1. I don’t have time.
Yes you do. You probably spend more time feeling anxious and complaining about the task of blogging than you actually do writing your post. OpenView’s weekly requirements for blogging are relatively simple: minimum of 5 sentences, minimum of 3 keywords used, and a topic that is relevant to our target personas. Blogs don’t have to be the length of your college thesis. Keep it brief. Most people don’t possess the attention span to read a blog post much longer than 500 words anyways.

Spend 15 minutes performing research/braining storming on a topic, and spend 45 minutes MAX writing your post. Keep it to a few paragraphs, make your title catchy, include a couple of backlinks and make a clear point. One hour. That’s it.

Write your post on Monday when you feel fresh going into the week. Don’t leave it until the end of the week — things come up, and let’s face it — when Friday at 4pm rolls around, the last thing anyone wants is to feel chained to a desk writing a blog post.

2. I don’t have anything interesting to write about this week.If you are writing about a new topic each week that has nothing to do with last week’s post, yes, you will feel frazzled when it’s time to craft your newest entry because you are not exercising consistency. Find a theme, and build off it each week. Become an expert on a topic. My suggestion is to build a series… Part I, Part II, Part III… you get the picture. This will give you momentum from week to week, and it will keep your readers coming back for more.

My next recommendation to help you find interesting ideas is to spark the creative juices from within — subscribe to the RSS feeds of the top bloggers in your space, whether it is sales, marketing, finance leaders, etc. Each Monday you should check out the previous week’s topics written by these influencers. This will give you some ideas on which you can focus for your new entry… don’t re-write their articles of course, but give your two cents — why do you agree or why do you disagree? My general rule of thumb: write 80% of your blog post from your own content and make sure you cite any thoughts/ideas that are not your own.

3. I don’t want to be judged by my content.
Blogs don’t need to be personal. Quite frankly, a corporate blog is not exactly the best place to share your controversial opinions, feelings, etc. Save that for Facebook. Yes, your blog will be published on the web and anyone can find your content if they really want to — your ex, your college buddies and your next door neighbor — but you are a professional, and you possess ideas and information to share that a lot of people will find interesting. Put yourself out there, and rather than thinking about it from the perspective of, ‘people will judge my writing abilities or what I’m writing about’ think, ‘people will be really impressed I am an active writer and I am an expert on a particular topic’.

It’s Monday… have you written your blog yet?!