So your expansion stage management teams have determined to prioritize corporate blogging as a critical 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 talking with other “blog bosses” at our portfolio companies, here are the top 3 excuses I can promise you will begin to hear from a good percentage of your company if you establish content delivery deadlines… and of course a few rebuttals!
1. I don’t have time.
Yes you do. You almost certainly spend more time feeling stressed and complaining concerning the task of blogging than you actually do composing your post. OpenView’s weekly requirements for blogging are somewhat straightforward: minimum of 5 sentences, minimum of 3 keywords used, and a topic that is applicable to our target personas. Blogs don’t need to be the length of your college thesis. Keep it short. Most people don’t possess the attention span to go through a blog post much longer than 500 words anyways.
Spend 15 minutes executing research/brainstorming on a subject, and invest 45 minutes MAX composing your post. Keep it to a couple of paragraphs, write a catchy title, incorporate a couple of links 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 comes 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 brand new topic each week that has practically nothing to do with last week’s post, yes, you will feel frazzled when writing 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 recommendation 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 suggestion to help you discover intriguing ideas is to ignite the creative juices from inside of you — subscribe to the RSS feeds of the top bloggers in your industry whether it is sales, marketing, finance leaders, etc. Each Monday you ought to check out the preceding week’s topics written by these influencers. This will give you several ideas on which you can concentrate for your new entry… don’t re-write their articles of course, but offer your two cents — why do you agree or disagree? My general rule of thumb: publish 80% of your blog post from your very own content and make sure you cite any thoughts/ideas that originated from someone else.
3. I don’t want to be judged by my content.
Blogs really don’t need to be personal. Quite frankly, a corporate blog is not specifically the greatest place to reveal your controversial opinions, feelings, etc. Save that for Facebook. Yes, your blog will be published on the web and many people will be able to find your content if they really wish to — your ex, your college buddies and your next door neighbor — but know that you are a professional, and you have ideas and facts to reveal that a lot of people will find exciting. Put yourself out there, and rather than considering it from the viewpoint of, ‘people could judge my writing skills or what I’m writing about’ think, ‘people will be really impressed I am an active writer and I am an expert on a specific topic’.
It’s Monday… have you written your blog yet?!
Devon Warwick is an Analyst at OpenView Venture Partners, and focuses primarily on business development for portfolio companies.
