We’re meeting with many companies who are having a tough time getting their people to write for the corporate blog.  The most common challenges: finding ideas to write about, finding a voice and style that is conversational, finding time to write, and overcoming fears about putting your own views and ideas into the public.

One way to add to “bloggers’ block” is to impose all kinds of “keywords-to-use-in-every-post” guidelines.  I recently heard a corporate blogging  manager talk about his top priority:  making sure bloggers use keywords to raise the brand’s search profile.  Of course, you want to increase search rankings.

But be careful about starting the blog this way. Instead, help your bloggers get comfortable with finding ideas and writing. Once they get in a good groove — which usually takes several months — then introduce the idea of how to incorporate certain keywords into their titles and posts.

Another thing to keep in mind is  that being interesting and providing value to readers is far more valuable than raising search rankings with boring, bland content.

Kudos to Rob Cottingham over at Social Signal for this illustrating the issue so well.