financefoxhunt

In honor of my recent less than robust posts, we’re going to explore why blogging is such a difficult form of communication. Here’s the top three reasons:

1. Constant creativity is hard -

A blog, unlike an essay, article, novel, short story, pitch…needs constant updates to be successful. The problem is, the average concept has about 10 perspectives to it, before it starts to sound stale. As writers, it falls to us to keep audiences engaged with the written word (not easy), and when one is forced to constantly come up with new ideas that meet quality standards, our creativity can face burnout.

One way to avoid creative burnout is to offer guest post opportunities to bloggers in your space. Odds are they have a slightly different perspective than you do and can bring a fresh perspective to a topic. In seeing how they approach the topic, you should get some new ideas, as well as establish good will in your topical community. Another good way to avoid creative burnout is to compile facts in your space and ask your readership’s opinion on the topic.

2. Original thought is tough -

There’s a huge stigma against regurgitating the advice of others and positioning it as your own. Yet, actually coming up with analytical arguments about where and why your industry is going the way it is, is one of the hardest things to do in engaging writing.

The first option to being seen as an expert rather as a copycat is to quote an expert, and explain why you believe they’re correct and the ramifications of what they’re saying. You are adding your own analysis on top of those who came before you (much like a research paper), this counts as original analysis. The second is to limit the amount of analytical posts to once a month or once a quarter. No matter who you are and what industry you’re writing about, your analytical juices should have recharged by that point so you can say something meaningful.

3. Your job usually isn’t to blog:

Most of us don’t have the luxury of having our blog be our full-time job, and if it is, we’re usually worried more about how to monetize it and network, than the actual writing. Since your focus can’t be dedicated 100% to the blog, the blog becomes an obligation rather than a joy.

The best of all worlds is when the blog is the company blog and you can carve out time to write a blog post a day. When that isn’t an option, test out different posting times to see how you can get the most bang for your posting buck.

How do you combat these problems? What’re some of the ones you face that aren’t listed here?

Tags: blogging, branding, social media, trends, writing