Systematic Business Blogging – special guest blog post by Michael Reynolds

Today’s guest blogger is marketing speaker Michael Reynolds, President/CEO of SpinWeb.

The benefits of business blogging are numerous. A great business blog can bring benefits in the form of SEO, authority, and increased trust. However, one of the most common complaints I hear when it comes to blogging is "I just don’t have time!"

Well, I would beg to differ.

The problem is not time, the problem is context. It’s very difficult to sit down once a week and expect to magically produce great content out of thin air. However, that’s what most people think they have to do to blog effectively.

Not so. Try breaking down your idea pool and your actual content into two separate contexts.

1. Idea generation. Make this a single context. The best blog ideas often happen during a conversation, in the shower, or while listening to a seminar. Don’t fight it. Instead, have a method for capturing these ideas so you can save them for later. I use Jott for this but a basic notebook will also work fine.

2. Writing. Make this its own context by simply scheduling one hour a week on your calendar for blogging. When you sit down to blog, pull out your list of ideas, pick one, and talk about it. When you are relieved of the burden of thinking up ideas and producing content at the same time, it will be much easier.

If you’re having trouble blogging consistently, try separating your blogging into these two contexts for a month and see what happens. You might find that it becomes much easier and that you never run out of ideas.

What are your tips for better blogging? I would love to hear them!

As I always say in corporate blogging training, bloggers for business don’t need to generate ideas as much as they need to be totally open to ideas, because inspiration is everywhere.  In a former post, "Six in a Fix", I suggested myth debunking, tie-ins with the news, true life testimonials, startling statistics, unlikely comparisons, and celebrity stories.  As a freelance SEO copywriter, Ideas have come to me from radio talk shows, billboards, comic strips, and song, and of course from other expert blog content writers like Michael Reynolds!.