Corporate Blogs: Great Marketing or Torture??

There are so many reasons why starting and maintaining a blog for your company makes sense. We have seen first hand at Red Sage how a strong blog can drive significant traffic to a website and, more importantly, even intrigue prospects into calling to learn more about our services. Blogs offer the opportunity to release fresh, good content onto social media platforms and improve SEO so a website shows up better in search engine results. A blog can build relationships with customers, friends, and prospects by sharing knowledge as well as our very human responses to the topics we write about, thereby making a company look more like the humans that work there.

So if a blog is so awesome – why does it sometimes feel like torture to keep it going?

Case in point – this blog. Within the past month, Dragon Lady reared her ugly head at our weekly staff meeting and strongly abused… castigated… GENTLY chastised a team member for failing to submit the draft of the assigned blog a week in advance of posting – as is our routine here. This routine was established to provide a couple of days of wiggle room so if things got insane (which they have been here), we would still have time to review and edit the blog to post it in time for the following Tuesday. The expectation was clearly stated at this staff meeting that woe would befall any staff member who failed to deliver to this standard in the future.

Yeah, so the draft of MY blog was due LAST Tuesday, and here I am writing it at 3pm on the day it is due to be posted. Oops. (Yes, I am feeling sheepish.)

Which brings us back to the question of a blog being great marketing or more like torture. My honest answer is: depends on the day, the schedule, and the personality. I still believe a blog is an incredibly useful marketing tool, but there will be times that you wonder why you keep it up – especially as you get busier and busier.

How to Achieve Long Term Success at Blogging

The only advice I can offer for long term success at blogging (offered at the eleventh hour of my final deadline):

1. Blogs are like exercise. They really do get results – so just keep going, even if sometimes you don’t feel like it.
2. Build at least a week into your process to give yourself wiggle room to meet posting schedules.
3. Establish accountability – even if the person holding others accountable proves human and falls down on the job sometimes.
4. If your name is Teresa, you should really forgive your friend Ellen for being as late with her blog as you were – especially after getting onto you and everyone else for this. (But your blog is still due a week early next time. Mine is too.)