If you want your blog to work for your business, blogging needs to become a habit. Here’s how to break down the barriers that are fuelling your resistance to forming a business blogging habit.
Barrier One: Your Blog Has No Clear Business Benefit
When you’re looking to establish any habit, you need to understand what the benefit will be. You need a reason to change or establish a behaviour. Because otherwise it won’t make any sense to you and it’ll be the easiest thing to drop. Blogging for the sake of blogging results in poor, irregular content, and does little to benefit your business. Blogging with purpose and with clear expected benefits, is key. Both my free e-book, Seven Secrets To Building A Blogging Habit That Works For Your Business, and the Blog Club Members’ Guide, have exercises to help you give your blog a clear, business purpose.
Barrier Two: You Don’t Know How To Do It or How To Get Better At It
Blogging sounds like it should be easy, right? But when you actually sit down to write, you can end up staring at a blank screen for what seems like an eternity. For most people, whose expertise is what they run a business in, coming up with few hundred informative and entertaining words on a subject, doesn’t come naturally. It takes knowledge, skills, and experience. But especially experience. To get good you need to know what to write about, learn how to write about it, and moreover, practice clicking ‘Publish’. Everyone has the fear of clicking ‘Publish’. And the only way to get over it, is to do it.
Barrier Three: You Forget To Do It
It’s all very well deciding that you’re going to write a blog for your business. But if you forget to do it, you may as well not have made that decision. All those hours you spent researching, analysing, and deciding will have been a colossal waste of your time. Like with any habit, at least in the beginning, you have to make a conscious effort to do it. Put it on your To-Do List or however you manage your daily, weekly, monthly tasks.
Barrier Four: You Don’t Make It Important Enough
This is connected to Barrier Three. It’s all very well putting it on your To-Do List, but you need to give it some priority. There are countless business owners with ‘Write Blog Post’ on their To-Do lists, who never get around to writing a post. If you can count yourself among them, think about what you can do to make it a priority. Is there a time of the day or week when you experience a lull? Are you someone who takes a while to get into the week? Could you use those times to write your blog post? Try to schedule a time when you’ll sit down and write your blog post, because the more you do it, the easier it’ll get. In Blog Club we have Blogging Parties where we write our posts (virtually) together.
Barrier Five: You Don’t Take Action
The final thing you must do if you want to establish any kind of habit, is take action. You can see the benefit, set the purpose, learn how to do it, put it on your list, and make it a priority, but after that you actually have to do it. If you find blogging hard, and time consuming, and scary, take comfort from the fact that so do a lot of other people. When I started blogging I cringed every time I clicked ‘Publish’. It took me ages to write a post and many of them weren’t that good. So I learnt and practiced more and more. And it worked. I’m still improving, and I hope that’s always the case, but I can write a decent post in less than half the time it used to take me to write a mediocre one, and I click ‘Publish’ with confidence. Blogging has become fun and easy, and so it can be for you too. Finding someone to keep you accountable can be a great help in taking action. Blog Club encourages you to set your blogging intentions for the week, and then report back with your triumphs and challenges. That allows others to share what worked for them in overcoming the challenges you face, while celebrating your successes with you.
What have you found to be the barriers to blogging? And how have you overcome them? Please share your experiences in the comments below 🙂