If you listen closely to your peers, you’ll realize that a lot of the things people say are simply regurgitated from one company to the next. Unfortunately these ideas are often myths, which are gradually perpetuated until they seem to be true. One such myth is that blogging is too time consuming for B2B companies to pursue.
It’s time to squash the myth that blogging takes too much time. While it certainly requires some hard work and dedication, any effort you put into quality blogging will serve your business well in the future. Not only does it help you position your company as a thought leader in your industry, but it also satisfies the content-hungry search bots that crawl your site looking for relevant information to serve users.
Unless your blogging efforts are eating up so much time that you aren’t able to pay attention to your core activities, blogging isn’t taking up too much time. Just look at this fantastic case study on one company’s blogging ROI. When properly executed, it really doesn’t matter how much time or money you spend on blogging – your return scales accordingly. So the reality is blogging does take time. But the myth is that it takes too much time.
Still, that doesn’t mean you want to waste unnecessary time. There are plenty of helpful tips and techniques for speeding up the blogging process without compromising your efforts. Let’s take a look:
1. Organize the Process Into Stages
The key to writing faster blog posts is separating the writing process into distinct stages. Many experts suggest five specific stages that consist of idea generation, research, planning, drafting, and editing. Your method may look different, but that’s not the point. The goal is to develop an organized process that allows you to break things up into manageable tasks. This lets you work on multiple posts at once, without losing track of where you are.
2. Immerse Yourself in Industry Blogs
You don’t want to copy other people’s ideas, but you do want to gauge what’s happening in your industry, which topics your clients find relevant, and how different issues are being featured. The best way to do this is by bookmarking a handful of resources and skimming through headlines on a daily basis. Your exposure to these different topics will undoubtedly spark creative ideas of your own, which makes the brainstorming and pitching process much quicker.
3. Find Your Ideal Writing Time
Everyone has a time of the day where they’re at their best – creatively speaking. For some that time comes first thing in the morning before the kids are up. For others, it’s late at night after a glass of wine. You need to identify when that peak time is for you and set this period aside for writing.
4. Develop a Formatting Checklist
For some people it’s not the actual writing that’s time consuming, but rather the formatting process. The best way to streamline formatting is to develop a simple checklist that allows you to make quick adjustments before publishing. For example, your checklist may include things like, use h2 for subheadings, make sure paragraphs are less than five sentences long, verify that there’s a call to action, add a feature image, and set the appropriate categories and tags.
Blogging isn’t something that you should view as optional. In today’s age of competitive internet marketing, your business needs a fresh, populated blog to stay relevant and attract new clients. While it’s easy to put blogging on the backburner, there’s no reason to do so. As you can see from this article, it’s actually fairly easy to take a blog idea from concept to publishing – you simply need a plan.
