A great blog brings attention to your business, wins new customers and creates a fan base for your brand. Whether you’re already blogging, or just thinking about getting started, avoid these five business blogging mistakes. Your blog will thrive, and readers will keep coming back for more.
Mistake #1. Pushing too much product content
Focus on thought leadership rather than on your products and services. Blog about trends in your industry, data-driven topics and issues that will educate and encourage feedback. Share the task of writing your blog with colleagues to introduce new voices and opinions. Your blog will attract attention, get shared and rank higher for search.
Mistake #2. Presenting instead of conversing
Think of your blog as engaging in a conversation. While your ideas should be interesting, every topic doesn’t have to be totally developed, every challenge doesn’t have to be completely solved. Invite your customers to join the conversation by adding their ideas and opinions. You’ll soon create a community of engaged and loyal followers.
Mistake #3. Not optimizing or analyzing
Making sure your blog is found by search engines will increase your keyword rankings and organic search traffic. Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy needs to identify the right keywords and integrate them into your blog content. In most cases, it makes sense to integrate your blog with your website, not publish it separately. And take advantage of free services, like Google Analytics, to track how your blog performs and how users find you.
Mistake #4. Ignoring the power of social media
Building your social media presence is a surefire way to share content with readers who will find it interesting. Encourage sharing of your content with prominent buttons on each post for services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. This makes it easy for your readers to share content they like and will drive more traffic to your blog.
Mistake #5. Writing that’s not up to par
There’s a LOT of content out there. Make yours so enticing that people are compelled to read it. What’s your passion? Your unique perspective? Tap into those and write about what sets you on fire. And while this may seem obvious, sharpen your wordsmithing skills to create readable content that’s free of spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors.
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