When corporate blogger Debbie Weil conducted one of her WordBiz surveys a few months back, it revealed some interesting things. Many of her CEO readers are savvy about blogs. They know all about blogging. And they know that it’s a great PR tactic to employ. WordBiz readers and survey respondents may be a skewed audience, so you’d expect that they would be receptive to the message of corporate blogging, yet something is stopping them from blogging right now. According to Debbie’s report: 65% of corporates in her survey admitted finding the time it would take to write a blog as their #1 concern. 51% are worried what to write about, while 27% wonder who in their company should write the blog. First up, your blogger doesn’t have to be someone in your company, but could be some customer evangelists that you recruit. Getting past that minor hurdle, you then have the huge issue of what to write about. Writers block is alive and well and blossoming in corporate America. Blogging is a huge time sink. I can spend half an hour to an hour writing a single blog post. I have even taken two hours to write a blog post on a number of occasions. So if you don’t have a five hours a week or more to dedicate to blogging, you are not going to be successful. Why? Because you have to dedicate enough time to writing meaningful, thoughtful posts. Should your entries be ghost-written by your PR folks, or at least finished off by them? The simple answer there is “Noâ€?. A blog that is born out of, or scrubbed by, your PR department or a legal department is no longer a blog, but a mouthpiece of corporate communications. Just look at the Google Blog as an example, but of course there are countless others. Give it the time required and keep it real. And to make the most efficient use of your limited time for blogging, try these tips:

1. Keep a list of blog ideas to get the creative blog-writing juices flowing. Make sure you carry it with you whereever you go — be it in the form of a notebook or a voice recorder (like an iPod with a microphone attachment). You never know when an idea is going to hit you.
2. Consider using the voice recorder to record entire blog posts in the form of podcasts. Use a transcription service or administrative assistant to transcribe or summarize the podcast into a coherent blog post.
3. Also consider hiring a blog consultant to coach you on writing style, optimal posting frequency, topic suggestions, etc. A blogging consultant can help you get comfortable and into the rhythm quicker than if you did it on your own. And they can provide you with tools and techniques to get past the writer’s block that we all have from time to time.