By now, anyone reading blog posts on this website has already figured out that blogging is good for their company. Good for informing prospects, good for communicating with current customers, good for your brand, and good for getting search engines to like you. (Actually, a search engine is an inanimate thing – it can’t really “like” you but you know what I mean.)
On Entrepreneur, an article by David Koji titled “3 Reasons Why Content Marketing is the Only Marketing Left”, those reasons are all about the benefits of blogging.
Knowing all the benefits, why aren’t we doing it more often? After all, the stats tells us that the more we blog, the more traffic we get to the website which in the end translates to more potential prospects. (Of course, you have to “convert” those prospects by getting them to identify themselves but that’s another story.)
So what are the worst reasons to write (or not write) blog posts?
You don’t care if you show up in search when prospects are looking for your services. After all, the website “lives” on its own. You shouldn’t have to add new content to it – doesn’t it have enough already? Besides, you already have plenty of prospects. It’s just those whiners in the sales department that always say they need more leads.
You don’t care about getting prospects and customers to your website. Don’t they already know you’re different/better/smarter than every other ERP and CRM partner out there hawking their expertise?
No one wants to write the blog post. Ugh – this is usually the reality at most companies. Everyone is busy and unless you have someone with a love of writing and good skills, most employees are not equipped to craft a relevant, compelling story on an important topic. Even paying (bribing?) with gift cards or a small bonus doesn’t usually get the job done.
Your boss says that you have to write the blog. What?!? Doesn’t he/she know you’re already busy doing really important work and you have no time (and no topics) for this task? Sure, maybe you could craft some posts about fabulous customer experiences but then you’d probably have to talk to a customer and who wants to do that?
What’s a gal / guy to do?
I have a few suggestions for the overworked, “under-idea-ed” (spell-checker tells me I made that word up but it’s one way to say “lacking ideas”) blog writer.
Use a topic generator. There are several online, most of them free. I like http://www.contentideagenerator.com/ because it asks me a series of specific questions about what I’m selling and the benefits of it before auto-generating about 300 blog titles. Of course, it would be worth its weight in gold if it actually wrote the blog post for me!
Curate content. Original content is fantastic but not every post needs to be original. You can use curated content from other sources as the basis of your writing. For example, if you blog about distribution + ERP, subscribe to the RSS feed from Modern Distribution Management to get content delivered right to you. If you’re a Microsoft Dynamics partner, subscribe to ContentMX for curated and original content.
Hire someone with domain expertise to ghost-write for you. (It’s probably not your mom or your friend from school.) Generally technology solutions in industry-specific situations is not a subject most people can quickly grasp. For example, the team at The Partner Marketing Group has spent years learning the ins and outs of ERP and we still get surprised by the topic requests from our clients.
To summarize, create content that your prospects and customers eagerly consume. If you don’t know what that is, ask them. Read your competitors’ blog posts and note which topics you find most compelling. Often it will be a good story about a real customer (I say “real” because fabricating customer stories is cheating in my book). Good luck!