Recently, a lot of people have asked me if I can help them start business blogs. While I’m always happy to help clients set up business blogs and work with other types of social media, I have to warn that business blogging is not for everyone. It can be a lot of work. That is why 60-80% of blogs are abandoned within one month.
DON’T start a business blog if:
- You think it will be difficult for you to write at LEAST one interesting, useful post per week. Recycling your old press releases is NOT an option here. Your articles must be conversational in tone and free of marketing-speak, or else readers will stay away in droves.
- You have lengthy approval processes before anything can be published to the outside world. If a seven-person committee, the VP of Marketing, and the CEO must all approve every single blog post and every response to reader comments, your business blog will fail. Ideally, you’ll set up some blogging guidelines for writers to follow and will require no more than one approval before articles and responses to comments can be published.
- You don’t have the time to respond to reader comments, or are uncomfortable doing so. By definition, a blog fosters a two-way conversation. Readers will comment on your blog, and you might not always agree with what they say. But blog etiquette generally requires you keep all comments visible.* Instead, you should respond publicly to the negative comments in a polite and constructive way. Alas, this takes time.
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* Note that deleting spam, off-topic, and abusive comments is okay, though, and expected by your readers. Deleting well-reasoned negative comments is NOT okay.