Last week, Old Taskmaster set you a simple challenge: To get your first blog post on the internet.
In the past week, you’ve researched some successful business blogs, written some posts, set up your own blog and publicised it through Twitter (or another social media service, such as Facebook). If you’ve managed to do it, good work.
Of course, Old Taskmaster has long ago noticed that new initiatives in business often end up being treated like pieces of home exercise equipment. At first, that shiny new treadmill claims pride of place in your living room in front of the TV and gets used daily.
But soon life gets in the way and everyone is too busy to spend even 10 minutes on it. Soon, it ends up in the corner gathering dust. Eventually – usually when guests come around – it gets hidden under the sofa, in the attic or at the back of the cupboard in the spare bedroom.
Finally, after many years of wasting storage space, the cupboards are cleaned out and it ends up sitting beside the kerb on hard rubbish collection day, often alongside a kanban production chart from a long-forgotten small business initiative.
In a similar way, a blog or a social media account is something many businesses set up with a burst of enthusiasm, before leaving it to gather digital dust on some distant, dark corner of the web. In the past, tech experts even created a term to describe this forgotten corner of the web: “MySpace”.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way for your blog.
Blogger and social media expert Adam Franklin recommends you should aim to write one new blog post each week. Even if you’re really busy (and who isn’t these days), it’s not a huge amount of time or effort to stay on the social media treadmill – just make a regular 30 minute appointment with yourself each week and aim to get one short blog post written up and published in that time. Don’t forget to publicise your work on the social media sites too.
So have you booked a blogging session with yourself? If not, it’s time to pencil one in – before your blog gathers too much digital dust.
Get it done – this week!
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
