Getting Barry in HR to write your business blog is like Queen booking a karaoke singer after Freddie died.

I think we know what a disaster that would have been. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great karaoke singers (myself included).

To assume a pub singer has all that’s required to perform those kinds of songs to a stadium audience is, at best, really fucking stupid.

Barry can write proper sentences.

But he’s shit at writing a business blog.

I’m sure Barry has written some very adequate emails. He might even have a GCSE in English. I’m making judgments about Barry based on very little but writing fairly decent workplace correspondence does not a content writer make. If it were as easy as stringing a sentence together, we’d all be doing this for a living (when I say living, I mean subsisting on tinned Farrow’s peas and packet noodles).

Barry knows his industry.

That’s great, knowing about your subject is important.

Research is most of the work when you’re blogging.

He’ll need to do that each time he writes, and he’ll need to produce a lot of content. Is Barry writing about HR or about the company itself? What is the actual purpose of this fucking blog, Barry? Because from where I’m sitting, writing a few memos isn’t enough for me to say “hey, Baz, your content writing is shit-hot, YOU’VE GOT THIS!”

And what’s Barry’s SEO knowledge like?

I hope he knows about organic traffic and how blogging is key to that. Sounds like he has no SEO content strategy at all if I’m honest, and I pride myself on (nearly) always being honest (except, that one time I lied about how many Mini Cheddars I ate and gaslighted my sister into thinking she had eaten them).

If Barry has the know-how to optimise the shit out of his blog so it gets seen by the right people—your people, the ones that will buy from you, then I stand corrected.

But Barry likes writing.

Oh great, he’ll love business blogging then.

Do you know what I enjoy? Astronomy still doesn’t make me an astronaut.

I’m being a little hard on Barry.

I actively encourage people to write if they love it. Most of my blog is about demystifying this stuff for freelancers and small business owners. I want people to know how to do it, especially if there’s no budget to hire a writer, they’re keen to learn, and they have bags of time.

And if that’s you, and your current blog sucks, book my blog review.

Time is the thing to consider when business blogging.

If you have oodles of it to learn how to write better for your business, to gen up on SEO, so your words can do what they need to do, that’s swell. But if you’re time poor, and you need someone who knows what they’re doing NOW, Barry is only going to hinder the process.

And SEO content writing takes time even when you know what you’re doing.

Enjoying something and being good at it aren’t always the same thing. If Barry has a natural talent for getting a message across, one that keeps people engaged enough to want to find out more, then you invest heartily in Barry, you nurture him, love him and treat him like the king he truly is but if you’re letting him blog for your business because you don’t know the value of it (and no one else volunteered) you’re a goddam idiot and deserve to be publicly flogged.

We’ve decided not to let Barry write our business blog.

I’m glad, I don’t know if it was me that convinced you or the fact that Barry already has a job and that takes priority.

Blogging is something he enjoys when he has the time to do it. Meanwhile, it’s doing nothing for your SEO. And if you don’t do it consistently you won’t reap any benefits. Sadly, Barry has been wasting the time he has already spent writing about HR Matters (and he was so proud of that blog title too).

One day Barry might leave his job, realising that HR is dull and he wants to write prose. He will nurture his gift and learn better by the act of doing, and I hope he does. In reality, I think he’ll stay where he is because he has no true desire to be a writer, of the SEO content kind or otherwise. 

And when you get your shit together, you will hopefully realise that writing is probably the most important thing in marketing your business, let alone the role it plays in your SEO.