How to Combat the Top 3 Corporate Blogging Excuses

So your expansion stage management teams have determined to prioritize corporate blogging as a crucial 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 my company’s blogging administrator, and speaking with other “blog bosses” at our portfolio companies, here are the top 3 excuses I can guarantee you will begin to hear from a good percentage 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 in all probability invest more time feeling anxious and complaining regarding the task of blogging than you actually do writing your post.  OpenView’s weekly requirements for blogging are relatively basic: minimum of 5 sentences, minimum of 3 keywords used, and a subject that is relevant to our target personas.  Blogs don’t have to be the same length as your college thesis. Keep it short.  Most people don’t have the attention span to read a blog post much longer than 500 words anyways.

Spend 15 minutes performing research/brainstorming on a subject, and spend 45 minutes MAX writing your post. Keep it to a couple of paragraphs, write a catchy title, include a few 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 let it sit until the end of the week — things come up, and let’s face it — when Friday at 4pm comes around, the last thing you will want to do is write 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 overwhelmed 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 specialist on a topic. My suggestion is to build a series… Part I, Part II, Part III… you get the picture. This will supply you with momentum from week to week, and it will keep your readers coming back for more.

My next suggestion to help you discover exciting ideas is to spark the creative juices from inside of you — subscribe to the RSS feeds of the leading bloggers in your space, whether it is sales, marketing, finance leaders, etc. Each Monday you need to check out the prior week’s topics composed by these influencers. This will give you several ideas on which you can concentrate for your new entry… don’t re-write their posts of course, but give your two cents — why do you agree or why do you 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 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 specifically the greatest place to share your controversial thoughts, 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 want to — your ex, your college buddies and your next door neighbor — but you are a professional, and you have ideas and details to reveal that a lot of people could find intriguing. Put yourself out there, and rather than considering it from the perspective of, ‘people will judge my writing capabilities or what I’m writing about’ think, ‘people will be genuinely 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.

Related articles

• Corporate Blogging: The Rap Song (marketingtechblog.com)
• Corporate Blogs In The Fortune 500 (socialmediatoday.com)
• Whiteboard Friday – Corporate Blogging Tips (seomoz.org)

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