The most common reason why businesses fail at blogging

Posted October 25th, 2011 / By Christopher in Business Blogging, Get Started

If you’re interested in going to work as a professional blogger for a company, there’s one thing you should know before you land the job …

Most businesses fail at blogging.

But why?

The short answer … short-term thinking.

I’ve been a professional blogger for the past couple of years now, and I’ve picked up on some challenges and similarities that usually occur when a business delves into the blogging world.

The one I’d like to explore today is the most common reason why businesses fail at blogging — it doesn’t matter what niche or industry the businesses is in.

Businesses suffocate their own blogs

The most common reason why businesses fail at blogging is because they don’t understand the idea behind blogging … not yet at least. That’s why blogging professionally isn’t merely a matter of working with WordPress and developing content, but also providing what executives can consider results. It’s your job to convince and reassure your employer that blogging is worth their time.

While this might not sound like the passionate blogging you’re used to, where you write what you want and let the web either take hold or not, this is the reality in most cases. There are exceptions of course, like businesses that get blogging, but for the most part you’re going to need to provide the business hiring you reason to continue blogging.

Why?

It’s all about the short-term results

Most businesses need to pay the bills just as much as anyone else, so when they take a chance an hire a professional blogger, they’re hoping the blog is going to help them reach their short-term goals. In most cases, this usually means boosting traffic or increasing the social following of the brand, but it can vary from business to business.

If the blog doesn’t seem to help meet those goals quickly, the business will likely balk and reconsider their strategy.

The key here is to remind your employer — delicately and strategically — that the blog is more of a tool for reaching long-term results.

As you know, it takes time and time requires patience — especially from a business.

The best recommendation here is to develop great content that targets the language your target customers or visitors are using to search the web. Maximize your search engine optimization in order to reach more people, while simultaneously targeting trending topics in a timely fashion and using comments and guest post contribution methods to reach pre-built audiences. Engage with people in a real way, and you’ll connect. Approach the process with numbers in mind (as the company probably wants you to) will lead to spam and soulless robotic techniques or automation.

Work hard and you’ll start building those results you need in order to keep your job.

Are you a professional blogger?

What do you find most frustrating from businesses and how to you work with or around it?

Christopher Rice is a publisher, entrepreneur, and abstract artist in Santa Monica. He’s a founder of Wearabl, editor of CreativeBlogger, and creator of Gumball. Friend him up at Twitter | Google+ | Facebook | Pinterest |