The 5 biggest business blogging mistakes
It takes time to create and share a valuable blog, so we thought we would take a look at why blogging is important for your business and how simple blogging mistakes can cause things to go wrong.
A blog adds fresh content to your website to keep you ranking well with search engines like Google and Bing. Done well, blogging can be a very effective marketing technique.
Since you’re an expert in your field, the information is at your fingertips. Surely it will only take a few minutes to create a blog – right? Not really.
1. Make sure it’s professional
Publishing a blog on your website highlights your expertise and allows you to inform and support others. It can create a dialogue with your customers and show a more personal side to your business.
Important as this is, it will only be worthwhile if it’s up to date and relevant, so your blogs must be carefully thought through and well researched.
2. Think about your customers
If you weren’t fascinated with what you do, you probably wouldn’t have started your business, but it’s important to think about what will be interesting to your readers.
Your aim is to be informative and helpful. If it’s entertaining as well, even better. Ideally you will be able to inject some of your own personality into your blogs while still making them interesting to read and valuable.
Choose some current topics in your industry and check your analytics to see which posts people read most.
3. Make a commitment
A single blog certainly won’t be enough to attract readers or to give your website search results a boost. You will need to publish regular blogs and develop your style and content.
Every blog has different audiences and different goals. If your business is focussed on something very specialised your blog probably won’t be for your local community, so you will need to think nationally or even internationally. That means thinking about much larger issues.
Some blogs will have a keen following in just a few months while others could take years to attract a dedicated audience. The important thing is not to give up if you don’t see instant results.
If you put in the time and effort, and you’re willing to adapt your strategy as you go along, you will be rewarded.
4. Share information regularly
Blogs are like busses, three all together and then nothing for ages won’t really work. Coming up with ideas is a common problem, so creating a blog calendar to make it easier to schedule your posts is a good idea.
While your business might not be seasonal, you can still choose topics relevant to the time of year. You can look back at last year’s posts and share what’s happened in the last 12 months. Look out for events, special occasions or popular films, music or shows to give you inspiration.
Once you have a plan it will be much easier to keep up to date with your posts. Be sure to share them on your social media accounts and link them to other pages on your website to make them work as hard as possible.
5. Engage your readers
People visiting a new page need a reason to stay and read. To start with they will probably quickly scan headings and images to see if the page is interesting.
It’s important to think about the first impression your page will make so choose your fonts, colours and pictures carefully and don’t confront people with large blocks of text. You will need to develop your skills to structure your posts in a simple, logical format with relevant, high quality content.
Pay attention to quality too. Long, poorly written content with grammatical and spelling mistakes will send your readers away quickly and with a poor impression of your business.
It really is easy
The blogging platform on an it’seeze website is really easy to use, so there won’t be anything to stop you creating and sharing as many blogs as you like. They will all look really professional and will be easy to read on any device.
Talk to your local it’seeze consultant to find out more about blogging for your business.
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