3 Business Blogging Mistakes and Their Solutions

Research study by HubSpot.com shows that companies who are active on their blogs generate 55% more visitors, 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links as compared to companies that do not blog.

It is true that many small and medium businesses have taken to blogging as a promotional activity; it does not however mean that they are doing it all right. Below you will find three blogging mistakes often made, knowingly or unknowingly, along with their possible solutions.

Mistake 01: Publishing Too Much Content about Yourself

While it’s good for your blog readers to know about you and your achievements or let’s say, about the company profile, it’s bad if you publish too much content focused only on YOU or the COMPANY like your services, your achievements and why you are the best! If it’s about company news or if the blog is focused on the company products, then company-focused content is accepted.

In other kind of blogs, writing about YOU solely displays a serious lack of thought leadership. If people are visiting your blog with the intention of reading educational content that will help them, they will be seriously disappointed if all they find on the blog is about how great your services and products are and why should the visitors buy them.

If you are planning on creating a blog along the same lines, it’s a very bad idea. What you should frequently share is educational content, excellent and thought-provoking blog posts and new market data and you should rarely share product info (unless it’s a product-based blog ONLY), content about YOU and software documentation.

Solution: Change the way you present the blog. Talk to people who manage excellent blogs and ask them what they did to reach the same position. In any case, make sure you write educational and fact-based blogs.

Mistake 02: Blogging Inconsistently and Ineffectively

The 2010 State of Inbound Marketing Report by HubSpot.com shows that companies who effectively publish and promote their blog have 46% success in acquiring customers through their blog-generated content. If you have a blog but do not bother to publish content daily or publish anything at all, the posts are not effective or useful to the reader. Your blog ranking will spiral downwards in few days!

The Inbound Marketing Report says that companies make a grave mistake by not utilizing the power of blogging and hence, they leave prospective customers on the table.

According to the data given in the report, companies that blog multiple times a day have 100% chances of acquiring new consumers from their blog content; companies that blog daily or thrice a week have 90% and 69% chances of success and companies that blog monthly or less than monthly have 38% and 13% chances of success respectively.

Solution: Its simple – make an effort to blog daily or at least four times a week. If you have run out of ideas, ask others like friends, colleagues, friends, online friends to pitch in.

Every person has a different perspective on the same thing so it’s worthwhile to talk to others. Or what you can do is hire ghostwriters or invite other people as guest writers on your blog. You can also ask employees in your company to contribute blogs in a rotational manner and compensate them for their performance!

Mistake 03: Blog Does Not Have a Unified Theme

Your blog will not be able to target a specific market if the content is scattered, disjointed, non-concrete and lacking in a unified theme. With blogs, the cardinal rule is to give your readers something, a reason to make them keep coming back. Why will you do this? Because doing so will someday nurture them into becoming paid customers!

Take for example, Income Insiders. From the start, we had decided that the focus of this blog will be to help small business owners, entrepreneurs and beginners to find ways to break through some of the hang-ups that may throw you off track in finding success.

When you browse our site, you will see all the published content – up-to-date is geared towards the same goal….and if we’d suddenly publish a few posts on unrelated topics like how to barbeque or how to clean your kitchen, this would completely spoil the purpose of Income Insiders…getting my point?

Solution: Think hard about the goals of your blog. What is your intention or purpose or expected result from your blog? Know the pulse of the audience and what you can give to lead them to your blog. Make your blog specific always/

Have tips on blogging? Do tell below…