A business blog is your platform to give your company a personality. Everyone will demand professionalism from your business, but there’s one place that you can inject a little fun and humour into that professional exterior and that is your business blog. The problem is that a great many businesses don’t utilise the power that their blog has. They don’t know how to use their digital space to its full potential, pushing traffic to their website and engaging better with customers. Blogging can help you with those things and if you do your blog right, you bring in more revenue – and money and growth is the goal of any company that wishes to be successful. If you’re not utilising your blog to do these things, or you’re not blogging at all for your business, you’re going to miss out on all the benefits you could be getting. You can also repel customers and really hurt your brand.
Your blog is a big part of your brand, and you need to understand this if you hope to be successful within it. You get the chance as a business to open your mouth and speak, talk to your customers and your audience and stand out from your competition. There is always a risk when it comes to utilising your blog, because if you don’t achieve the right content that is relevant to your customers, you’re going to be wasting your time and missing the mark while you waste it. You have to be able to pour the right people and the right techniques into your blog so that it has the desired effect. You need the right SEO strategy, the right information about PPCnerd AdWords Automation Scripts, and the right freelancer helping you out with your content and the regularity in which you post it. There’s a lot to learn about blogging for your business. You can’t give up on the idea of reaching out to customers in a new way just because you don’t know how to do it. It’s time to learn.
It’s up to you as a business owner to carve out as many opportunities for your business to succeed as possible. Some of those opportunities will happen offline, but in the digital world, it’s all about that space. It does take time and effort to get the right strategy written up for your blog and put in the right steps to use your digital space the best way that you can. This means learning where you could be making mistakes and rectifying those mistakes quickly. Below, you’ll find nine mistakes that you could be making and how to fix them.
- Sharing Company News. One of the many ways that businesses use their company blog is to share company news. It’s a natural way to use it, but it’s just not a strategy that works for most businesses. To put it quite bluntly, customers just don’t care about whether you are hiring and firing in your customer services and they don’t care about your annual growth. They care about your services and your products, though. They want to read the content that will help them to solve their issues. Work on that instead of your yearly turnover news, and you’ll keep their interest.
- Over-Optimizing. You need a level of SEO keywords in your blog, but if you are covering your entire blog in keywords, you’re going to get told off by Google! Focusing on your entire content marketing strategy rather than pouring everything into just your SEO is the way to go here. Don’t let Google hate your content just because you’re overdoing your keywords. Be smart!
- Too Professional. Business blogs have an awful habit of being too wordy. Lots of long words and jargon that piles on top of each other to make no sense to anyone but the person writing it isn’t how to relate to customers. People want to read exciting, easy to understand information in your voice, not the voice of a stuffy professional.
- The Hard Sell. You know those social media posts that are full of emojis and sales pitches and ‘hun’? Everyone hates those. If your blog posts read like one big sales pitch, you’re going to put people off and as fast as they click on your blog is how fast they’ll click right off it. Too many calls to action, too many hard pitches and too much pushing is going to push people off your blog and right out the door.
- Black & White. While you may have a wonderful theme, a blog of just writing is boring. It’s pure and simple; too much writing and no imagery is going to ruin your blog. Breaking up the information with something visual is the way that you can push your blog forward and get people interested in what you have to say. Images also work to improve your SEO, so that’s a bonus.
- No Promotion. You’re diligently writing a blog and you’re creating amazing content, but you’re still not making sales. Ask yourself how you’re promoting your blog and where you’re pushing it. If you can’t answer that question, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not promoting it right. Get active online and start sharing your blog posts across every platform you’ve got.
- Fun Writing. We mentioned that blocks of text just don’t work without images, but you also need lists and bullet points and punctuation to help make your writing fun. You can make your blog posts far more readable if you mix it up a little instead of blabbing at people without a break.
- No Engagement. If you are blogging and not reading the comments on your blog, you’re making a huge mistake. People are going to comment on your posts and you need to engage with them as much as possible. Talking to your customers and potential customers is how you are going build relationships and create a loyal base for your brand. Don’t miss out on that customer engagement; be insightful and create a conversation that can continue.
- Outsourcing Incorrectly. You could have the best blog ideas and the most exciting business website, but you don’t have the time to write your blog yourself, so you outsource. This isn’t unusual; all the best bloggers give their blog to a fantastic writer to create the content for them. However, if you end up with a writer who is sub-par, your blog is going to suffer for it. You need your writer to produce very high quality content that makes sense for your blog, so invest in the right person and your writing is going to thrive for it.
Your business blog is your place to shine for your customers. It’s your space to get out of the suit and get excited for what your business does. Don’t be put off by the work that comes with putting together a succinct and witty blog post. It will take an investment of both time and money, but once you put in that money, you can watch your blog become a roaring success. All it takes is for you to be on top of your blog and how the content is created. Once you get that ball rolling, you can stop making small mistakes and instead allow your blog to flourish. Be patient; it’s going to take some time to get the customers and traffic that you need for your blog. If you are willing to work hard, you’re going to see your blog become a huge success.
