The 7 Deadly Sins Of Business Blogging

Business blogging is a great way to bring customers to your site. It lets them know what you have to offer, establishes you as an authority in your field, and increases your search engine ranking. Sometimes, however, you might find that your blog is doing more harm than good. Before you know it, it starts sucking away your time, energy, and effort, all without delivering any measurable results.

Are you starting to wonder if your blog is actually doing your business more harm than good? Examine these seven deadly sins of business blogging to see if you’re slowly destroying your blog.

Sin #1: Churning Out Low-Quality Content

Your blog needs to be more than a keyword-stuffed mess that fails to deliver what you’re promising in your headlines. Before you write a post, sit down and decide what it’s going to offer your readers. Are you going to teach them how to solve a problem? Offer them a promotional product? Tell them a secret about your industry?

Write posts people want to read. They’ll turn your blog into your business’s greatest marketing asset.

Sin #2: Always Focusing On You

Your customer doesn’t come to your blog just to hear about the latest advances your company is making or to learn all about the charity work you’re doing. While those are certainly things you should share, the focus of your blog shouldn’t be your company. It should be the customers!

Find ways to turn it around and explain what you can offer your customers, how your content benefits them, and what your business can do for them.

Sin #3: Failing to Edit

Oops! You just clicked the “publish” button, and you’ve already found four mistakes in your draft. Unfortunately, this undermines your credibility with your readers and could cause them to not want to see what else you’re offering.

Take the time to edit your posts before putting them out to a wider audience.

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Sin #4: Inconsistency

There’s nothing worse for your blog than inconsistency. Your readers need to know that you’re going to publish high-quality content on a regular schedule. If they’re expecting a post from you, it should be there. If they aren’t expecting a post, unless there’s a reason for one—an announcement, a contest, or a new debate or event in your field that needed to be written about immediately—it should wait until your next scheduled date.

Sin #5: Ignoring Other Bloggers

You aren’t the only blogger in your industry. Unless you’re in an extremely specialized, niche market filled with people who speak very poor English, you’re probably not even the best blogger in your field. Don’t try to pretend that you are!

If you’re writing about the same thing six other bloggers have covered this week, make sure you’re doing it with a different twist. Guest post on other blogs to help bring traffic to your website. Offer other bloggers the chance to guest post on your website. Acknowledge other bloggers and work with them to build greater value for all of your readers.

Sin #6: Walls of Text

Huge blocks of text have their place in your blog. If you’re telling a story, you don’t want to break it up with images in the worst places or let an ad get in your way.

On the other hand, a post about how to tell if your air conditioner needs maintenance (and most other content, for that matter) needs bullet points, images, and headings that will help break up the content and make your post easy to scan so that readers can more efficiently find what they’re looking for.

Sin #7: Giving Up

You’ve started a blog, but it’s just not doing what you want it to. You’re working hard to create high-quality content, but it’s not bringing in readers—and the readers you do get aren’t converting to sales. Your blog has turned into a time-consuming, stressful project that isn’t accomplishing anything for you—or is it?

Giving up on your blog is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Back off your schedule, hire a service like Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) to help produce your content, or reevaluate your strategy, but don’t give up! Your viral blog post could be the one that’s just around the corner. Plus, every post you publish will still rack up SEO points, even if no one seems to be reading it.

There’s no such thing as a perfect business blog. You’ll have posts that are huge successes and posts that are failures, and the line between one and the other is so fine that you might not be able to tell the difference until you see the results. By avoiding these seven deadly sins of business blogging, however, you’ll avoid dragging your blog down into a dark pit where the only sounds are those of frustrated readers who have been disappointed by your content.

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