Getting to work with lots of CEOs, Business Owners, and Top Executives gives me an “inside view” of what they talk about and think about when they are using social media. One area more and more are getting into is “blogging” – yes blogging.
As you have heard me talk about over and over, I firmly believe blogging is the “cornerstone” to social media – if for no other reason than it is the only place you can still write in paragraphs instead of 140 characters. It is also the only way I have found where people (our audience) really get to know you – from a transparent and inside perspective so they can see what you are passionate about. The two key elements required for blogging are PASSION and STORIES. You can be mediocre as a writer but if the audience feels your passion and you have some good stories from your experiences, you will be great as a blogger.
This leads me to the point of this blog post – when should someone blog? Maybe the real question should be “when shouldn’t you blog”? If you approach blogging correctly, there isn’t a day that goes by that you don’t see or experience something you can blog about. When you are out with customers, talking to employees, hearing about new ways to approach an issue, hearing about the successes of other companies not in your industry, hearing from your industry experts, attending a speech, and the list goes on and on. We are exposed to these every day so the opportunity is certainly there.
But you can’t just drop everything and blog whenever you want – doesn’t work that way. But what you can do is “capture the idea” at the moment you have it and save it for when you do have more time to blog about it. I use Microsoft OneNote. It is probably the best product Microsoft ever created because it works the way I work – bits and pieces at a time. But whatever your system, capture the thought when you have it and then come back to it when you can. Give yourself some time. Block out 30 – 60 minutes when you can engage fully without interruptions. When you do, you won’t just write one post, you will write several because you will be “in the blogging zone” for a while.
Don’t beat yourself up for not blogging every day. Decide how many posts you can write a week, generally that is one or maybe two, and then capture content along the way and give yourself a small block of time to finish. If you try to do parts of a post every day you will fail. To not be frustrated, capture ideas and blog when you have some time – put it on the calendar. But if you didn’t capture your ideas ahead of time, you will be like most of the other bloggers (65% of blogs fail in first 6 months) and sit there looking at your computer screen asking, “What am I going to blog about this week?” At that point, you are most likely going to be part of the 65% that fail. CAPTURE, SCHEDULE, BLOG, ENJOY!
