Is Your Blog in the Graveyard? 7 Fatal Blog Errors
If you do not have a business blog, start one immediately.
Blogs are proving to be the most significant factor in building a business, a brand, traffic, and, ultimately sales. If you already have a business blog and are not realizing the business growth that you should, you may be making some fatal errors that should be corrected right away. So for newbies and veterans alike, here are 7 really bad mistakes and your “fixes” for them.
1. Using your blog to promote your products and/or services above all else.
No one wants to read over and over again about your products/services and how great they and you are. People flock to blogs to get new information, to be educated, and to get fresh ideas. If you don’t focus on these things, you are “dead in the water.”
If you want to understand this concept better, visit some blogs of direct competitors or related businesses and read some of the posts. Realtors are blogging about home decorating and landscaping ideas; swimming pool companies are blogging about water safety and great pool party ideas. These business owners understand that they can get visitors, a following, and social media “shares” by giving good information or educating their potential customers.
2. Not having your blog on your website.
If you have your blog somewhere else, you have to keep putting links to your site on those blogs. While there is nothing wrong with links, readers are more apt to move on to the next blog post rather than leave an interesting place to visit you. Get your blog onto your website.
Then, visitors are already there and you can use some subtle conversion techniques once you have them “following” you. There is also an SEO advantage to this strategy. Your blog adds pages to your site. If you have a 350 page site, and 325 of those pages are your blog, you will get noticed, and those pages will be indexed by the new search engine algorithms.
3. “Keyword Stuffing.”
If you write blog posts only with the intent of putting in as many keywords as possible, search engines will punish you. Select a few keywords that are best for searches in your niche, and use only 3 or so in your posts. And make certain that they flow logically with the content of your post.
4. Not posting frequently enough.
The more often you post, the more people will come to see what new information you have to share. If you slack off, your followers will lose interest and stop coming. Try to post 2-3 times a week. And if you cannot do this, hire someone who can. There are many enterprises that do nothing but maintain blogs for busy entrepreneurs. Regular posts with great content keeps them coming!
5. Not using social media effectively.
Get yourself a presence on all social media sites. Post your blog on your account pages, or, better, give “teasers” about your post with a link to your blog. You also want to use social media to start conversations, get responses to content you provide, and interact with those who are commenting. This is how you build relationships with potential customers, and it is how you promote your brand.
The other important aspect of using social media is this entire concept of sharing. Have buttons on every post that allow readers to share your post on their social media pages. If you have really good information, and it is creatively and even humorously written, people will want to share it.
6. Failure to use analytics.
Wouldn’t you like to know how many visits you get a month and where those visitors come from? Wouldn’t you like to know how many of your blog readers then visit other pages on your sites and how long they stay on each page? Wouldn’t you like to know how many people are linking to you from specific social media sites? How about some numbers on how many blog visitors then become customers?
There are great analytics tools that can track all of this for you – Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, and Clicky, just to name a few. Some are free; some charge a very low fee, all things considered. The point is this: Analytics will tell you what to change, where to focus your efforts, and how to improve visitor experiences depending upon the devices they are using.
7. Poor writing quality.
If you know that you do not write well, then stop writing your own posts. Grammar, spelling and punctuation errors are a real turn off to many people. And if you are not creative, find someone who is. The other really fatal error is to use vocabulary and sentence structures that are too “intellectual” and/or too complex. The old “KISS” principle is still valid. Most people who have successful blogs say that they write at about a 9th grade level.
