Blogging is hard – there I said it and out loud too!
However, blogging for business is undeniably a good habit for your staff, your website and your business. According to Hubspot, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors. Their data clearly shows that blogging directly correlates to better business results. In Hubspot's 2014 State of Inbound study, they found that companies that blog are 13x more likely to enjoy a positive ROI on marketing spend, which is ultimately the goal that all marketers are aiming for.
But implementing a blog and sticking to it is hard
- It’s time consuming
- It doesn’t deliver results straight away
- It needs attention from people in the business who know the business and customers intimately
- It’s also a hungry beast, to get the best results you need to feed it good content regularly, at least once a week and some even say that you need to write blog posts that are over 2,000 words – eeek!
- It’s a big commitment
- It’s also a major change in behaviour.
To make a switch to an inbound marketing approach that uses blogging to draw visitors your site means a change in marketing behaviour.
You need to carve out time in your busy day to brainstorm topic ideas, interview people, write, edit and proof-read articles, ensure that they are keyword optimised, find a cool image and then publish.
This all sounds very hard, but as I said before, it has been proven a blog does work and it continues to work. One of my clients has a single article that is over two years old that continues to drive 5,000+ visitors a month.
But back to changing habits. If you haven’t read the book Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath, I highly recommend it. In Switch they discuss how to implement change when the change is “hard”.
One of their recommendations is to script the process and then visualise when you are actually going to make time to do the new behaviour.
So, for example with these new blogging tasks you need to block out time in your diary, say after you’ve cleared out your emails and have got the first coffee of the day, sit down with your list of blog topics and crank one out. Or whatever time of the day works for you.
Another way is to have a visual reminder, in much the same way as you would create a reward chart for your kids when they do their chores – set up a chart that you can tick off each day that maps the changes in behaviour that are necessary for a successful blogging strategy. I’ve created a business blogging checklist here for you. Now if only I could create an app that rewards you for doing a blogging task – like the Supernanny Jo Frost app for kids rewards… Jo Frost could say “good job clever clogs!!” whenever you complete a blog post or post on social media… reinforcing the positive change in behaviour, but I digress…
If things are really dire you could also sign up to this service where you have to pay money to your nominated charity if you don’t do what you said you would…
And once you publish you also need to promote those articles through various channels, owned, earned and perhaps even some paid media, plus read other blogs, comment on other blogs and share those blogs….. phew!
Like I said, blogging is hard, but ultimately rewarding. Is blogging on your marketing to do list this year? If so, download the blogging is hard checklist to keep you on track.
