There are a lot of reasons to be a blogger: some of you are blogging for personal reasons to share your personal life and passions with others while others blog for business reasons.
If your blogging for your business online presence with time you can develop a great network, expand your company’s reach and influence, and change your industry.
Regular blogging is one of the best things you can do to help your business grow – businesses that write on their blog regularly receive 55% more website visitors and have 437% more indexed pages in Google than business that do not.
But even when you’re blogging for business, there are important mistakes you want avoid if you really want to see the desired success.
Let’s examine some signs that reflect the real reasons behind your blogging.
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Your blogging only to keep your website “fresh for SEO.”
A mistake often made by bloggers who can’t comprehend why their blog isn’t having the impact on their business that they thought it would. More likely they heard that fresh content is critical for SEO, and that Google and Bing both love to find fresh content. This is all true, but to have their content have the impact they had hoped for they need to stop writing to try to impress search engines, instead they need to focus on their human readers. You need to create great content that people want to read and share, instead of writing short, lower-quality blog posts just to make the site have some appearance of activity.
Instead of trying to trick the search engines into thinking you have great content, actually have great content.
Produce articles that people will want to read and share with their peers. Far more important than being “fresh” is having high-quality content for people to read.
If people don’t like your content enough to link to it, share it, or comment on it, it’s not going to have the same impact on your business as truly great content will. If you want the benefits of having great content, you must put in the time and effort to produce it.
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You post all your company news and press releases on your blog.
Great blogs exist to share useful information, unique insights and help you express your leadership and expertise on a subject to your audience. They can be narrowly focused on one topic, or cover broad subjects. Blogs shouldn’t exist just to put your company’s news and awards online. There’s nothing wrong with doing that from time to time, especially for unusual events, but if the majority of your content has no educational value for your audience, that’s not a good sign.
Make sure that you’re providing content on your blog that is interesting to people at all levels of depth.
There’s nothing wrong with posting exciting company news or announcements on your blog. But if that’s all you post, your blog just won’t attract a lot of repeat readers. Great bloggers know to mix up their content and keep things interesting so that they can attract readers without relying on too much promotion.
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You used to blog every week, but it’s actually more like once a month.
You’ve got a lot of things going for you, but you need to be regular and consistent if you want to see some real growth of your blog. Without regularly adding content, it will be difficult to attract subscribers or inbound links.
If you have pressing demands on your time that make it difficult to publish new content frequently, you still have good options for making your blog vibrant and successful. Try creating shorter content that’s still high-quality, such as useful top ten lists, or take older posts from your blog and update them for new and improved versions. It’s also useful to make sure that you set reasonable expectations for yourself so you don’t get discouraged.
Blog readers love to be able to come back to sites that they enjoy to read more content. If you’re only updating your blog sporadically, it’s hard to build a real fan base. Keep creating great content, and set reasonable expectations for the frequency and volume of your blog so that it can fit into your schedule.
For great results gather topic ideas or questions from your sales team or contact form to learn about what your potential leads and customers are asking about and what their needs are, and write posts that answer those questions.
It’s great to use your blog to encourage your customers to continue to learn more, and to share content with them. Make sure that you write for a broad audience by varying the types of content you produce, and use your blog to generate leads as well as to help your existing customers.
Have you ever faced any of these problems on your own blog? How did you solve it or change your content?