Regular blogging is, we are told, essential for gaining and maintaining search ranking. Not only are we providing more content to help the search engines to find us; we are also showing we’re still a going concern, and talking about our work and our industries.

But what happens when we’re just too busy to maintain a blog? It’s something that never really occurred to me when I was re-starting my freelance career after a spell in employment. I did have time on my hands to think up blog ideas, research them, write and edit them, add images and submit to my Google my Business page.

Then I got super-busy.

Now, being busy is obviously a good thing. It shows something’s working, I’m being discovered in my niche and there’s a trickle of returning clients and new openings keeping things ticking over. But there’s a nagging doubt at the back of the mind: how can I blog when I’m too busy to blog?

As a self-sustaining online business, that’s like a shop being too busy to hire staff. As soon as one leaves, you’re short-handed, your customers get fed up of long queues and start going to other shops, and it’s the beginning of the end.

Foxes and rabbits

What we have is a system not unlike the “foxes and rabbits” scenario. The more rabbits there are, the more food there is for foxes. So the fox population goes up, which leads to a natural cull of rabbits. But that leaves hungry (read: dead) foxes, which lets the rabbit population start to grow again, and the cycle continues.

It’s Monday morning and for the first time in about three months, I haven’t got a job to do. As someone brought up during the mass foxes and rabbits hysteria of the 1980s, this is troubling. But on the plus side, I’ve got time to write a blog post.

Why it’s a problem for writers

Anyone who wants to maintain a Google profile knows they’ve got to blog. Luckily for most businesses, they can either source internal talent to write them, or outsource the task to freelancers, which I’m very glad about. After all, if you’re making lots of money, you can spend some of it to earn even more.

But when you’re a writer, your blog is also a kind of showcase, a portfolio. It would be very weird for me to start hiring writers to blog about writing, wouldn’t it?

… But luckily, you’re not a writer

The good thing for you is that you’re (probably) not a writer. If you are a writer, I can’t believe you’re reading this when you should be blogging.

But by wisely not being a writer, that means you’re in a position to hire one to build and maintain a professional quality blog with no loss of face.

And now, whenever you see I’ve written a blog, know that there just aren’t enough rabbits to eat, so please don’t make me overturn your bins. Get in touch.