Everyone blogs these days. Most likely, you already have a blog for your business – and good for you! It can be an effective marketing tool in this content-is-king era.

But the question is how to keep the blog alive when you have a business to operate and so many other things to do? Time and again, small business owners abandon their blogs, because they either don’t see the return on their time investment or simply can’t find the time for it. So, how do you manage to keep your business blog alive and, what’s more important, working?

Schedule

One of the most important things about blogging is consistency. Your readers need to know how often they can expect new great content from you. So, your blog needs a schedule – but how often should you post? The minimal recommended frequency for your new posts is once a week: otherwise it will be hard to maintain interest with the readers, and the effectiveness of your blog will drop. Anyway, come up with a schedule you can maintain and make sure you stick to it.

Commitment

A great tip to help you stick to this schedule is to make a commitment. Tell your readers when you will be posting new content, and you will feel obliged to do as you promised. You may want to start with more updates than one a week, so that your blog builds up and features enough content to get the readers interested. But in any case, let your readers know how often you will be posting, and you’ll have no excuses to skip your blog update.

Motivation

Most likely, the blog isn’t bringing you direct sales, and it’s hard to stay motivated to go on when you don’t really see the return on all the time and energy you invest every week. At times, you may be tempted to shut down the blog and forget about it – and that’s when you will need these ‘pro’ arguments:

  • even if you don’t see an immediate increase in sales, good content builds up your brand image, and the fact that it’s shared across social platforms makes your brand recognizable to new people;
  • regular blog updates give Google a signal that your website is alive and deserves better rankings (which it will eventually get thanks to the blog);
  • the way people interact with your content, the topics they are more interested in. All this helps you understand your audience better and build more effective marketing communication with your customers.

Blogging can be hard: not everyone is born a writer, and even if you are. You have a business to run that takes most of your time. But that doesn’t mean blogging is not worth it. It absolutely is, so keep your blog alive and enjoy the long-term effects! What’s your main struggle when running a business blog? Feel free to share it in the comments.