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For over a decade, blogging has been advocated as a method of driving traffic to your website and demonstrating your authority. However, there is a lot of confusion about what should go into a business blog and how to make it a useful part of your business. This is a problem that is faced by small business owners and Fortune 500 companies alike. Here are the 5 biggest mistakes blog owners make:
Forgetting Who It Is Serving
Your blog isn’t written for you. It is written by you, but it should be focused on the needs of your audience. The minute you lose sight of that is the minute your blog stops being relevant or useful to them, and that’s when they stop reading it.
Hiding Its Existence
If you’re going to take the time to blog, don’t hide the fact that it exists. This should be easy to find and easy to use. If it is designed correctly, that blog is a useful instrument for your potential and current customers that can reduce or eliminate a lot of the confusion and customer service complaints before they even have a chance to get started, so don’t hide it. Announce it loud and proud.
Failing To Make It Relevant
Unless you are in the business of making funny cat videos or internet memes, they don’t really have a place in your blog. You may draw traffic with those things, but you won’t be drawing the right kind of traffic to your site. Your blog should be designed to attract and serve the kind of people you want buying from you.
Failing To Make It Useful
If your blog is not serving the company by helping to educate consumers about what to expect when they work with you, how to resolve common customer-caused problems before they can happen, or how to get more and do more with the things they purchase from you, it’s not useful to you and it isn’t useful to them. Your blog should support your business. It should be a combination sales and customer service agent.
Inconsistent Posting
No matter how good your content is, you won’t build a following if you aren’t reliable in when and how often people can expect to get your content. It’s time consuming to write blog posts, which is why most small business owners are too overwhelmed to blog for their business on a regular basis.
If you can’t afford to hire someone to build and maintain your blog for you, the best way to do this is to create a blog plan. Choose a topic you’ll be covering that you can dive into in greater depth over the next month or two so that the total number of posts you get out of it is between 6-8. Spend one week writing up all 6-8 posts, and then schedule their release one per week. This way, you’re keeping your blog up-to-date but you aren’t overwhelming yourself with the amount of labor involved in doing it.
Join Us for Our Better Blog Series
Every Friday for the next six weeks, we’re going to be covering ways to overcome these 5 mistakes. We’ll look at who your blog is serving, what their needs are, how you can use your blog to prepare them to do business with you, how you can educate them about what they need to expect when working with you, how you can find and fill in the gaps that lead to complaints and problems, and how you can help them get more out of the purchase they’ve just made.
Are You Excited?
If you’re looking forward to hearing more or have questions about this series, let us know. We do read and reply to comments.
What Blog Mistakes Did We Miss?
What are some of the big blog mistakes you’ve seen business owners make? What annoyed you the most about those mistakes? What would you like to see more of in business blogs?
What Are Your Blog Struggles?
Do you struggle with creating or maintaining a business blog? Let us know what your biggest hurdles are and we’ll see if we can help.