I’ve been in all kinds of shoes regarding blogging.
I’ve been the writer that just gets a brief. I’ve been building briefs for writers. I’ve been convincing my CEO bosses to blog. I’ve been convincing co-founders to blog. I’ve come as a consultant to fix company blogs.
I’ve seen underoptimized, neglected, overoptimized, genius, dumb, generic, and try-too-hard blogs.
Chances are, your boss hates to hear about blogs and blogging.
Chances are, it’s your fault too.
CEOs are a very specific crowd. You don’t just get to run a company without being and walking a certain way.
If your CEO hates or scrutinizes blogging, it’s because you or someone before you were doing it wrong.
Here’s why CEOs hate blogging:
1) They waste money on it.
Most CEOs have spent too much on blogging without seeing any returns.
To be fair, most of them also stopped earlier than necessary to see results.
How to fix it: Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. If you blog twice a week for a year, your blog WILL make you money.
If you blog inconsistently or stop too early, you win nothing.
2) They don’t know what to expect
CEOs like to talk numbers and they like to see numbers. They hate to hear that writers or editors “feel” the post is good or bad. They hate trusting any sort of emotion- or taste-based judgement.
How to fix this: plan some ±20 posts ahead, get approximate search volumes of the keywords you plan to cover, add them up and take a fraction of that to present as possible traffic if you get in top 5 results for them. Find similar articles by your competition and check the traffic they get using tools like Ahrefs. Obviously it’s all a big stretch, and usually well-written posts end up picking more traffic than expected, but you’d be giving your CEO at least something to work with and expect.
3) They let writers come up with topics
I’m sorry, writers. I know you’re good at what you do.
But I’ve worked my share as a writer too and I know how easy it is to gravitate towards things that are comfortable to write about. Things that are cool.
Most of the time content that is cool has zero ROI.
Your content needs to be effective by targeting specific needs and interests of your customer audience. Bells and whistles are not a must.
What we get instead is thousands of generic company blogs full of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Harry Potter-themed articles. Something other writers read for inspiration, but no client would ever extract value from.
How to fix it: let your writers write, but don’t make them come up with blog post topics.
Get a professional content plan, and make sure you regularly audit and update your content strategy. Working with your own website analytics is as important as using third-party tools.
4) Because you don’t analyze enough
Whoever is in charge of the blog at your company probably has too much on their plate already. Typically that’s the general “marketer” or “SEO manager” who should be focusing on other things.
They don’t have a clear picture of what’s ahead in terms of blogging, and they don’t evaluate past content.
These blogs only keep running because they are cheap to run and no one cares. Mostly out of habit or tradition, not logic or benefits.
The results, however, are cheap as well.
How to fix this: Have a content plan. Evaluate all your published content several times a year. Update and optimize all blog posts based on your impressions data. Hire a content strategy agency, it’s always worth it.
5) Because they analyze too much
If the CEO is very demanding and is obsessed with data (as they should be), chances of paralysis by analysis are pretty high.
If you have published 3 blog posts and you’re having daily meetings about them, 10 KPIs, 5 dashboards, and your CEO is sending you articles on blogging from searchenginejournal – you’re skrewed. Come work at WebCopyLand instead.
How to counter it: make your CEO commit to weekly blogging for at least 6 months. That’s 24 posts minimum – sit down and analyze once these posts are published, indexed, and interlinked, not earlier. Showcase your authority to your boss. Or hire me – I will showcase mine.
6) Because of perfectionism
Discussing, approving, drafting, and all the back and forth content production stuff is just worthless busy work. Your CEO is right – none of that matters for your ROI.
Your blog post starts working once it gets indexed by Google, so don’t delay publishing it. Moreover, your content gets to its full power once you let it accumulate data on Google Search Console and use that data to update the post and uptimize it for your audience’s search queries.
That is why – Get it done and get it out. Start blogging ASAP.
How to fight perfectionism in blogging: Keep your blog URLs short and generic, that will allow you to update your blog posts later. Frequent content audits will get you a lot of data-based ideas for optimization of your existing blog posts. Explain to your CEO that it’s the analytics data that matters for effective blog posts. The first-hand unique data that your competition does not have, it’s your edge over them. To get that data you need to produce natural and detailed content fast. Explain that to your writers too. That’s the beauty of blogging – your posts can and need to be updated.
7) Because you’re doing it wrong
There are at least 600 million blogs, 77% of Internet users read them, and 74% of companies report that content marketing improves the quality and quantity of their leads. Surely there’s a way to do blogging right?
Just like there’s a right and wrong way to do anything.
When done right, blogging is an amazing way to get organic traffic from Google and learn your customer audience interests and search behaviour better.
Blogging takes time to kick in and bring effect, but you will get there with consistency and data-driven decisions.
If you need help with any part of the process – reach out to us and we’ll help develop a proper content plan for your blog and help maximize the effectiveness of your website.