Blogging for Business is Like Five Minutes on Air

Good ideas, along with the good people who came up with those ideas, abound, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions; synergy can be generated through spreading those ideas around.

Let me hasten to assure Say It For You blog readers that I would never advocate  becoming what blogging maven Stephen Guise, in a guest blog for Problgger.net, dubs “copy bloggers” who “rip content” word-for-word from other blogs’ RSS feeds.  Nor do I want blog content writers to be what Guise calls “name-droppers,” who give rise to the question “Okay, so what do you bring to the table?”

I guess when it comes to business blog writing, my recommendation would be for you to read materials of every ilk and on diverse topics – billboards, magazines, newsletters, flyers, brochures, along with blog posts, deciding which presentations “speak to” your own ideas on your own topic.

The Real-Impact blog, for example, is written by my longtime friend and fellow National Speakers Association of Indiana member Jean Palmer Heck.  I found Jean’s recent post on “Why Media Training Takes Time” very relevant to my work as a ghost blogger and corporate blogging trainer. You see, in offering business blogging assistance to entrepreneurs, practitioners, and employees, I found, their biggest concern is the lack of time to devote to regular corporate blog writing.  That’s why I was blown away by Jean’s estimate of the time needed to properly prepare for a five minute interview on national radio or TV:

• An hour deciding what message to deliver
• An hour refining the message
• An hour practicing delivering the message
• An hour considering the worst questions
• An hour doing a series of practice interviews

Take comfort, you who are hovering at the pool’s edge, hesitant to dive into business blog writing. You probably won’t need anywhere near five hours per blog post (although Stephen Guise claims “Some of my posts take me 15 hours to write!”). On the other hand, you want to be sure you’re doing what my high school English teacher used to call “autographing your work with excellence”.

Corporate blogging for business demands discipline and time, no doubt about that.  Using a freelance SEO copywriter is one solution to that problem.

“Your five minutes of airtime is a golden opportunity to deliver a simple, effective, relevant message,” says Jean Palmer-Heck.  Certainly you should think of whatever the number of seconds of your online readers’ attention you can engage as your golden opportunity to introduce them to your company’s message!