I’ve seen too many business websites completely abandon their blogs. Keeping up a business blog is a mammoth task when you’re doing it on your own and haven’t hired external help.

Your job is to run your business — managing its accounts, sending out quotes, preparing marketing materials, submitting tax forms… Adding regular blogging to that could mean many late hours which you can’t afford.

And, yet, regular and consistent business blogging is absolutely imperative if you plan on ever gaining traction with your website’s SEO. Although the subject is intricate and complex, the general consensus is that a blog post a week fits the bill for a good Search Engine Strategy.

As someone who writes for a living and has written over 1,200,000 words, I can tell you a few easy things that keep your fingers limbered up and ready for production as a writer despite a long day at the office.

1. Write it when you think about it

Forget about writing on a schedule. You could say to yourself, “Yeah, I’m going to write every Sunday night,” and then Sunday night rolls along, you’ve had a heavy week, and the last thing you want to do is blog.

Do you know what kind of content you’ll write if you then force yourself to your keyboard? Junk.

You need to write when the idea comes to you. I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve “made notes for” — things I’m “definitely going to write because the topic is so amazing!” — and then ended up just trashing it.

Write when the idea comes to you, or as soon as possible after it comes to you. Sure, you might have a week where all you do is write. Great, schedule the posts for later so you can have a breather when you go through lull periods as a writer.

2. Write something you love when you’re blocked

I came up with the idea for this post after writing one of my regular emails to my toddler. I keep those up pretty religiously, and I was smiling so much after I wrote it that I thought, “Hey, if a business guy was blocked, all he would have to do is write something he loves and he’ll come up with a business blog idea!”

Maybe you’re trying to publish a novel or write a book about your brand and are really enjoying doing it. Well, jump into that project instead of your business blog, have a good time doing it, and see if you get any business blogging ideas that night.

Or write an email to a friend, anything. The trick is to get your fingers moving over the keyboard, to take it easy, and to have a good time while writing. The ideas will come to you.

3. Don’t overdo the editing

Write, write, write, and don’t sweat whether or not you should’ve written “that” or “which”. Sure, use some writing tools to make the job of writing easier, but at the end of the day, you are the writer. Don’t let the tools dictate your choice of words. Just write what comes to mind and make sure it isn’t repetitive.

If you’re not a pro writer and are just doing your best to keep your business blog up to date, you need to make the subject fun. Guys like me who ghost-write for a living and have to be able to write anything and everything under the sun, according to who’s paying the invoice, need to have that skill of pushing through, of hammering away at the keyboard even when the subject and task is a snoozefest.

Writing for us is a job. Whether it’s fun or not doesn’t change the fact that we have to put food on the table.

But that’s for guys like me. For a person who’s just trying to get some content onto their business blog, it’s best to keep the whole thing fun.

4. Do some keyword research

Like everything else on this list, there’s the “fancy” way to do it, and the quick way. You should opt for the quick way because the fancy way either costs too much or takes too much work. When you write for a living, that work comes under the heading of “Cost of Services”. For you, a business writer, more time on a blog post equals less time on your business.

Do this step lightly. 

The importance of keyword research is twofold:

• You’re more likely to hit hot buttons which people are searching for and hence gain more traffic
• It can be a lot of fun and get the creative juices going

There’s quite some know-how to advanced keyword research, but there are numerous tools online which can get you started and give you a general idea of what people are searching for.

5. Write because you love it, write what you know

You must have fun. Even for us guys doing this for a living. Nobody reads things that are not interesting, and writing something you don’t love will come through in your work and make it dull.

What do you know? Well, you know your business.

Who is your market? Write for them.

Writing regularly is tough. And all the abandoned blogs out there prove that it can be so tough that people simply give up on it.

This is a terrible SEO mistake. If you’re on the verge of giving up, rather pay a writer to get a few articles out for you, for a few weeks, until you feel you can get back on the horse again.

But you’re less likely to hit any sort of burnout as a business blogger if you stick to topics that are of interest to you and which make it easy for you to sit at the keyboard and write.