Blogging: little and often beats occasional and brilliant

I've written blogs all day today, which is either an excellent or a terrible position from which to write a blog about blogging – you decide.  But it's given me a useful reminder: the businesses that blog well aren't the ones with the best ideas, they're the ones who actually show up.

I've lost count of the number of clients who've told me they're ‘not really bloggers’. What they mean is they wrote three posts in 2019, ran out of steam, and have felt vaguely guilty about their neglected blog page ever since.  Sound familiar?

Perfection is the enemy here

Waiting for the perfect topic, the perfect time, or the perfect 1,500-word masterpiece is precisely why most business blogs go quiet.  Nobody's inbox is desperate for your magnum opus.  What readers actually want is something short, useful, and honest, delivered often enough that they start to expect it.

A 400-word post that answers one real question your customers keep asking will outperform a 2,000-word essay that nobody finishes, published once and never again.

Consistency beats brilliance

Search engines like fresh, regular content.  Readers like knowing you're still there.  And – this is the bit people forget – you get better at writing the more often you do it.  The first post is always the hardest.  By the twentieth, it's just Tuesday.

If a weekly post feels unrealistic, be honest with yourself and pick a rhythm you can actually keep.  Fortnightly and reliable beats weekly and abandoned by October.

Where the ideas actually come from

They're not hiding in some special ‘blog ideas’ vault.  They're in your inbox, in the questions your customers ask on calls, in the thing you explained for the third time this week and thought, ‘I should really write this down’.  Your blog doesn't need to be clever.  It needs to sound like you, and it needs to solve a small, real problem for the person reading it.

The bit nobody wants to hear

Blogging isn't a one-off task you tick off and forget.  It's a habit, like flossing or actually reading the terms and conditions.  The value isn't in any single post – it's in the body of work that builds up over months, quietly proving you know what you're talking about.

So if your blog's gathering dust, don't aim for brilliant.  Aim for done, and then aim for it again next fortnight.  That's really the whole trick.