Gelfand Design

In half an hour, I am going to lead a workshop on business blogging. In 30 minutes my students will file in to soak in the knowledge and insight they have come to expect from me. And yet, as I sit here typing up my first blog post in weeks, I wonder silently: how can I suggest to these small business owners that they invest several hours a week in blogging when I can’t seem to manage it myself?

Whether I actually publish this post is still up in the air. I’ll decide when I’m finished. Therein lies…

Challenge #1: No Post Is Interesting Enough

I will need to encourage my students not to let the pursuit of perfection stand in their way. I am guilty of starting and deleting blog posts that I felt were not good enough, not timely enough, or that I guessed my intended audience wouldn’t care about. Hence, dead silence in the blogosphere. Not productive. I do have lots of great ideas, but they always seem to come to me in the middle of the night, when I’m too tired to do anything about it. Surprisingly, sometimes these ideas don’t seem quite as sterling in the morning as they did eight hours earlier, leading me to…

Challenge #2: Getting into a Schedule for Writing

Sure, no time is ever convenient for posting a blog when there’s laundry to be sorted, Web sites to be coded, and a hundred other Things That Must Be Done Before I Go To Bed. I need to encourage my students to find a time slot to carve out for themselves—a time where they are relaxed but not sleepy, energized but not wired. Does this time exist? I’m not sure, but clearly it’s my responsibility to invent it if it doesn’t exist. After all, blogging is part of my marketing plan.

Marketing plan…oh, wait. That brings me to…

Challenge #3: Finding a Blog Strategy

For some people, blogging is a way of pouring out their hearts to the world. When you blog for business purposes, you do want to speak honestly about the things you are passionate about. But it is a calculated expression to a degree, carefully crafted to be truthful at all times but also project the persona that you want the world to see. No ranting, no soapboxes, no pictures of your cat. You decide ahead of time what the purpose of your blog is, what kind of content you want to publish, and what kind of audience you want to attract.

If you are not clear on the why, what, who, and when (see Challenge #2), then posting regularly becomes a real burden. Aligning your values and your business plan, managing your time so that you can devote your best self to your blog, and creating a well-defined plan for blogging with purpose will help get you on track.

Yeah, that’s what I’ll tell them in twenty minutes.