Excuses Not to Blog

Inevitably most small businesses that we meet or talk to think of excuses not to blog instead of reasons to blog. Most of these are the same businesses that feel like they should get involved with social media, but only because they hear Facebook and Twitter on TV or from other businesses telling them they should, not because they actually see the value. Needless to say, these businesses are not generally successful at either. Let's take a look at some of the common excuses and why they are wrong.

No One Cares to Read About What We Do

Really? I find this surprising. If you run a business in which you offer a product or service that people don't care about, maybe it is time to find a new line of work. Let's take the powdered metal industry for example. I personally don't care to read about the latest and greatest of metallurgy. I would likely never add a sintered metal best practices blog to Google Reader (Rest in Peace). My family and most of my friends probably share the same feelings I have about powdered metal blogs.

But I am not your customer and probably never will be, although I am willing to bet that your business has a customer base, or at least a prospective customer base. Additionally, there are probably others in your industry that do the same thing as you. These are the people that are willing to read your blog, or can at least stumble upon an article and eventually learn more about your business. I am not asking you to give away all of your trade secrets, but there are things you can share to help others in your industry and become one of the reputable thought leaders of the industry. Not everyone cares to read about what you do, but there are at least some people that are looking for what you do.

We Don’t Have the Time

While I can sympathize with you there, it is still not an excuse. We don’t post as many blogs as we would like to, but not having enough time certainly shouldn’t be an excuse. You spend time and money in your other marketing efforts, right? Don’t think of a blog as only a marketing piece, but think of it as a way to create good content that people want to read, thus creating link bait, while increasing the amount of pages and content on your site. You are working towards relationship marketing as well as improving your inbound marketing through SEO. Spend 15-30 minutes a day, think of it as marketing time, and write some good content that your users want to read. Someone at your company can afford 2.5 hours a week to improve your business. If that is too much time, write for 1.5 hours a week. Either way, WRITE SOME GOOD CONTENT.

We Just Don’t See the Point

Ok, I can get the idea that you don’t understand the value of a blog, but that's not an excuse not to write, it is just a lack of knowledge. Each blog post creates a new page full of terrific content! These pages are going to increase visibility in the search engines and more traffic. You are establishing credibility in your industry. You are establishing relationships with prospective or current customers to increase leads/sales. Remember this stat? Companies that blog get 55% more traffic. Or what about the HubSpot survey showing the relationship between blog post frequency and customer acquisition? Probably not if you don’t see the value of a blog. While every one of your blog visitors isn’t going to magically convert into a sale, you are certainly increasing your web visibility and hopefully traffic.

Nobody at My Company is a Good Writer

Most people aren’t reading blogs because they are being written by Pulitzer Prize winners. They are reading blogs for the information contained within. When you blog about a topic, hopefully it is a topic that you are an expert in, or at least passionate about. Some of the blogs I read are far from winning a writing award, but there is so much to learn from the articles, I can let some grammar and spelling mistakes go. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t read something that is painful to get through because the grammar is awful and every other word is misspelled, but spelling and grammar check has come a long way. Paste your copy into Word, run spell check and make some changes.

To Sum it Up…

There are probably some good reasons not to blog for some people, but not most. As a small business you have even less excuses. You don't have to get approval from 15 different channels, and if you aren't already the decision maker, you probably have easy access to that person.

What is generally disappointing is that businesses tend to come up with excuses NOT to blog before coming up with excuses TO blog. I will acknowledge that it at times can be difficult to stick to a blog schedule because other things come up that seem more important, just look at our blog. If you have something that you are passionate about, start creating some good content and reaping the benefits. Over time, as long as you don’t abandon your efforts too soon, you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.