To blog or not to blog, that is the question…

I’m often asked my opinion about corporate and personal blogs, both in regards to their effectiveness and how I find the time to write them.

I’m a big fan of blogging, starting my first blog oh so creatively entitled “Kirsty’s thought of the day”, when I was in University (I have no idea if anyone actually read it – but I enjoyed myself!)

As far as finding the time for a blog goes – well, if that’s going to be an issue, I’d recommend scrapping the idea of a personal blog. If you don’t have the time to update a blog at least weekly, there might not be much point doing one.

BUT – you might still want to consider a corporate blog.

Most people write corporate blogs without even knowing they’re doing so, they just never take the time to actually turn their valuable content into a blog (ie. a searchable resource for your company).

Every time you answer a query to a client, you could potentially re-word it as a frequently asked question style blog. I did just this myself this morning at our real estate agency Elephant Property. I’d sent an email out to all our owners yesterday with some common tax-time queries and realised this morning that with a few tweaks this could easily be reworded in about two minutes to be a corporate blog. Voila – blogging done for the week.

If you’re running short on topics for your blogs sit down in your team meeting and task everyone with answering two commonly asked questions about your industry. When we run short on topic ideas I might email a friend who deals with someone in our industry in another state and find out how their service provider is going or what queries they have in general about our industry. Blog topics abounds.

And while I’m a huge fan of blogging – it’s not without it’s perils. I’ve had my hand smacked on more than a few occasions for unknowingly committing cardinal blogging sins.

Two of these that pop to mind straight away are:

1. Reposting my blogs on another site and then, because I hadn’t been notified of comments on those blog posts, not replying to them. Queue angry people thinking I was quite rude (bad blogging etiquette) by not replying to their questions and comments.

2. I have a policy that if I’m writing a blog that mentions a type of behaviour that I have found a bit poor service wise – I don’t mention the organisation – personal choice. However, just recently I mentioned an amazing organisation in a blog about poor service from a separate organisation. It wasn’t done with malice, but it was poor form and I ended up giving myself quite a hard time over doing it without thinking.

So, if you are going to blog, be prepared to make some mistakes along the way. The very point of having a blog is that you’re open for public comment – and at times, people aren’t always going to like what you’re writing. If you’re prepared to accept that why not get started writing your blog today?

Kirsty Dunphey is the youngest ever Australian Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year, author of two books (her latest release is Retired at 27, If I Can do it Anyone Can) and a passionate entrepreneur who started her first business at age 15 and opened her own real estate agency at 21. Now Kirsty does lots of fun things which you can read about here. Her favourite current projects are Elephant Property, a boutique property management agency, Baby Teresa, a baby clothing line that donates an outfit to a baby in need for each one they sell andReallySold, which helps real estate agents stop writing boring, uninteresting ads.