Business blogging isn’t a new strategy, but the interest in it seems to be on the rise. And I’ve seen a steady increase in interest over the last 10-12 years. It hasn’t been a straight line of increase, but the general trend has been going up and right now it seems to be on a strong incline once again.
But even with the interest in business blog growing there is the other side of the coin. This side is where businesses start a blog and then shutter it after a while. Maybe after a year. Maybe after a couple months or even after one or two posts.
Here are some of the reasons why businesses may give up on their blogs…
1. Not Enough Rankings
One of the main reasons for starting a business blog is to boost search engine rankings. You might have a handful of important keywords on a list. You create one blog post for each of those keywords and wait to see if the rankings follow.
If you’re an established and well known brand that can work relatively quickly. And obviously you need the content in the blog to be very good compared to other content trying to rank for the same keywords.
But even then it’s difficult to see quick results in the rankings. The search engines want to know that they are sending their users to trusted sites. And that takes time and a number of indicators.
Blogging also tends to lend itself more to longtail keywords. So while “shoes” might be very challenge something like “how to tie your dress shoes in a more stylish way” may be something you can rank for.
And the more you go after those longtail keywords the more you lift other pages on your site up for those more general keywords.
2. Not Enough Traffic
Traffic often relates to SEO and rankings. The more rankings you have and the higher they are the more traffic you get. Often the expectations can be a little unreasonable for how fast this can occur. So the traffic doesn’t appear and a business blog is discarded.
And it may be a case that you’re not using the blog content on social media. It used to be that you could share a title and link to the post on social and get traffic. But now the social channels want to keep their users. So it’s better to re-post your blog posts directly on social media to build a following. And that can lead to more indirect traffic.
3. Not Enough Time
A big reason I see business blogs suffering is that the person in charge doesn’t have enough time. Blogs are often given a small proportion of a marketer’s task schedule. And blogging almost always requires more time than anticipated.
There is the brainstorming aspect. There is the research and writing. There is editing. There is uploading and formatting. There is sharing and promoting.
It can really be a full time job.
4. No Inspiration
Creating any type of content is a mix of both art and work. It’s important to stick to a schedule and think of it more as work than as of art. That’s not the romantic way to think about it though and as a result many give up on blogs because they lack the inspiration.
I like to look at professional songwriters as good examples. They schedule writing sessions multiple times per week. They’re almost always not inspired leading up to these sessions. But they put in the work and create great songs.
And when inspiration does strike they can still drop anything and write a great song…or a bad one.
Novelist, John Grisham, talks about this approach as well.
Blogging is the same. It’s about sticking to a schedule even if you’re not feeling it every time.
5. Too Many Associated Tasks
I mentioned this a bit earlier, but it’s worth pointing out alone. There are a lot of tasks that go along with business blogging. You have the title brainstorming, the researching, the writing, the formatting, the sharing and many more. You might be doing interviews. You might be doing external and internal linking. You may be setting aside time for editing.
It’s not as simple as sitting down and writing a post for an hour each week. There is more that goes into it and this can be a surprise for many new business bloggers.
6. Writer Is Too Busy
I’ve seen a few new businesses grow as a result of their blogging. They really focus on it, but as their business grows the person in charge of blogging takes on new tasks and roles. The business is expanding into other areas as normal, but that makes the original writer too busy to blog.
This requires a new solution in most cases.
7. Too Expensive
If you’re outsourcing the blogging it may be that it’s too expensive. Or maybe you hired someone to blog and now you’re thinking that this person is too expensive.
Sometimes it’s just this simple.
Conclusion
I wanted to write about these items so you could see if you fit into one of them. Or maybe you fit into more than one. But realize that there are solutions to just about each one. You can look at your blogging schedule and make some changes. You can delegate the blogging if you’ve gotten too busy. Or you could delegate other things if you like the blogging.
Whatever the case, hopefully you’re able to continue blogging.