Did You Know it Takes 4 Hours to Write a Business Blog...?
Blog writing is a vital business content marketing tactic. Statistics show that not only do they help you drive 55% more traffic to your website, that they are also the second most important content marketing tactic globally, sitting prettily just under video (SEMRush).
So, we can agree it's important and we want to do it but still, not enough business-to-business organisations are doing it, and if they do, it's a little haphazard. Why? Time and resources. Typically the SME B2B organisation has a small marketing team spreading itself across every area of marketing from branding and web development to sales collateral and lead generation. And these darned blogs take time, 4 hours of it per blog by all accounts and that's up 65% from 6 years ago.
And then? On average businesses publish one blog per week, so that’s a potential 16 hours a month dedicated to writing blogs alongside everything else on your to-do list. Yes, they're an investment in time but they are worth it.
In this blog, we give you some key tips to help you reduce your time writing and at the same time make your blog content more effective and aligned with your business goals.
Why Does It Take So Long to Write Business Blogs?
Well the B2B buyer is perhaps a little more of a demanding reader than your average recipe blog reader. Therefore we need to do research, as well as share expertise and knowledge and that's just to get our target customer aware and interested before we even start moving them down the sales funnel.
Gone are the days of just trotting out 500 words so you have something new and updated on the website. The average length of content listed on page 1 of Google is now over 1400 words. This means the content is more detailed and comprehensive (and takes you longer) but on the plus side, this is what business buyers engage with and this is why Google ranks it higher because its chief mantra is 'relevancy'. The more relevant you are, the more you answer people's questions, the greater the ROI (read traffic and leads) your blog will deliver.
*Top tip - a great tool for checking out what questions are being asked on your chosen topic is AnswerthePublic.
1400+ words eh? Another challenge some business bloggers face is that business owners, managers and even some marketing team members aren’t trained copywriters. It’s like paddleboarding (yes, it really is). You really want to do it and it seems like a really good idea but when you’re doing it for the first time, or you haven’t done it for a long time, it's not only hard work, it’s a real challenge to stay on top of it, stay afloat, go in the right direction and then get back on again when you fall off. More than that it’s tiring because it’s a skill you have to learn. It’s like the 10,000 hours rule,
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“It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates at computer programming.”
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
Good blog writing does take practice. It’s guaranteed that professional B2B bloggers have undoubtedly racked up more than 10,000 hours honing their copywriting skills. In my first copywriting job, just my first piece of writing went through 30 drafts (I’m not joking) because I was learning business writing skills which are different from creative writing. That piece of writing didn’t take days, it took weeks!
The flip side to this story is, you can learn and become an expert even if you don’t have the experience. At the same time, when you need the average 4 blogs a month for your business, you don’t necessarily have that amount of time at your disposal to sharpen your proverbial writing nib. This is why we’re sharing 6 important tips for blog writing. They might not be the sexiest, ‘smack you in the face with the best headline ever’ kind of tips but they are the tips that will help you get the job done without pulling your hair out and hopefully in less than the published average of 3.5 hours!
6 Tips to Save Time When Writing Business Blogs
1. Write a Blog Strategy & Schedule
You know how when you don’t write something down it just doesn’t get done?
Aha, yes…that…
Your blog strategy is key. Your blog strategy should mirror your marketing communication topics and keyword research and have in it blog topics that directly address your marketing objectives (whether for your product or to promote news from your business).
Once you have the topics, create a schedule and allocate them to others in your team (if you have other writers). With a schedule you will all know what needs to be delivered and when and make the time for it. This kind of scheduling is important because on a busy day, your mind doesn’t perform well when it has to do cart wheels and work out what it has to do next. Without a schedule your blogs will slip down your to-do list, or take longer because you don’t know what you’re writing. Remember, on average you’ll want 4 blogs a month, so planning is vital.
So you don’t like ‘scheduling’ and you like to pick a topic you like?
Well, frankly, save that for your travel or baking blog. Any content you create needs to serve a purpose other than making you happy when you write it (tough love here because many people do this). Your strategy and schedule will focus your mind so that quite simply the right content gets created that drives traffic (remember you could be sending 55% more traffic to your site) and that it gets done. Period.
*Top tip - block out a time in your diary to complete your blogs. If it doesn’t have a time allocated it will slip.
2. Plan and Structure your Business Blog
Before you start writing, plan and structure your blog. This includes; the objectives (including the action you want to the reader to take), what you want to say, how you are going to say it, plus the evidence do you need (e.g. statistics or images).
Break it all down into sections (e.g. our section, 5 Tips to Save Time When Writing Business Blogs) and identify your H1 (title tags) and H2 (sub-section) headers. You’ll need to identify these if someone else is uploading your blog for you.
Know what other pages you want your blog to link to (Google loves links). For example, your strategy might be a series of blogs on a topic, in which case you want to make sure they are linked when their topic is mentioned.
3. Know Your Keywords Before You Start Blogging
Know your keywords at the start and your blog will be easier to write. If you try to optimise your blog for SEO after the fact, not only is it more difficult as you’ll have to do a whole new editing job, it will cost you more time. Know what you need to write at the beginning and you’ll save time and stress.
4. Consistency Creates a Blog Audience
Make things simple for yourself. Publishing blogs at a consistent time will not only get greater engagement from your readers that are following but you'll also save time as the blogs become a priority to write and deliver by a certain time. Deadlines have a habit of making us get things done quicker, don't they?! Choose a day of the week that you publish your blogs and this will also save you time and make things simpler when co-ordinating your social media schedule.
5. Find Someone Who Writes Blogs Faster!
I don’t know how I would do my job if I couldn’t type 70+ words per minute! If you’re a business owner or exec who finds the writing side too time-consuming, you can get someone else to write it for you but make sure you give them a great copywriting brief either on an audio note or on a copywriting brief (learn more about copywriting briefs here). If it is a colleague in your business, they will already know your objectives, brand and communications strategy, so all you need to do is distill the key information so they can create the story. Perhaps you could even give them a quote on the topic from you, which will raise your profile in the blog and flesh the content out. If you’re employing an external copywriter, they will need a full copywriting brief or blog strategy and schedule in order to deliver the job efficiently for you.
6. Here's One I Made Earlier!
If you’re in the UK, you’ll know the ‘here’s one I made earlier’ quote from a legendary children’s programme, Blue Peter. It’s just as important here.
Firstly, you can speed up your business blog writing by updating old blogs by adding new content, statistics or changes in perspectives. You can also build your SEO by re-publishing and updating old blogs.
Secondly, you can add more spice to your blogs by having a pre-prepared set of quotes from your senior execs and experts that can be inserted into the blogs. You can ask them for these when you have completed your blog strategy. Those quotes can also be used across social media and are golden tickets to PR mentions when you have quotes ready for deadline-focused journalists hungry for a quote on a key topic.
So there you go, 6 tips to help you make business blog writing easier, more effective and less time consuming.
And so, how did I do? 1648 words. 2 hours including uploading…Drop the mike! I’m outta here!
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