Blogging offers several benefits to your business. In addition to providing valuable information to potential customers, building brand awareness, and increasing the authority of your brand, you can also increase the traffic to your website over time. All of these factors work together to build your brand and benefit your business. But, when it comes to business blogging, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong. Here are a few common business blogging mistakes to avoid:
Mistake #1 – Focusing on the Wrong Topics
Publishing blog posts to your website is great, but it doesn’t do much for you if no one is reading them or the audience you’re targeting is irrelevant for your business. When starting out with a corporate blog, it’s easy to get caught up in what you think your target audience wants to read instead of what they’re actually searching for.
You might get it right sometimes, but without research to back you up, you’re likely to also get it wrong. Writing a bunch of blog posts on topics your potential customers don’t care about can end up being a huge waste of time. Instead of starting off on thoughts alone, take some time to research and plan your blog strategy.
First and foremost, you should know who your target audience is. If you don’t have buyer personas, it’s time to take a step back and create these representations of your ideal customers. In doing so, you’ll have a better idea of who you’re writing for and trying to connect with, which will often result in more relevant and engaging content.
From there, you can conduct keyword research, market research, and competitor research to get an idea of what topics matter the most to your customers. There are several ways to use your blog for business and this gives you a much better chance of focusing on the right topics for your audience for more effective blog content.
Mistake #2 – Forgetting About Relatability
When it comes to corporate blog writing, many businesses just write and tend to forget about relatability. The blog content you’re writing is for people, which means you have to relate to your readers and connect with them through your content. It’s hard to connect with tons of corporate jargon and buzzwords. In general, your blog audience doesn’t want to read that, and they won’t – they’ll just leave your website. This is why forgetting about reliability is one of the business blogging mistakes to avoid.
Corporate blog content can still be professional and accurately represent your brand without being dry and boring or confusing to the point that it drives your readers away. You can make your content more valuable and relatable for your readers by choosing topics they want to read, instead of what you think they should want to read.
Then, keep the writing style professional, yet simple – leave the jargon out as much as possible. Your content should speak to people, not robots, so don’t be afraid to add some personality and connect on a human level. Even if you’re B2B, you’re still talking to humans.
Mistake #3 – Ignoring Readability
Ignoring readability is one of the most common business blogging mistakes to avoid. The readability of your content not only affects how easy it is for readers to engage with it, but it’s also a factor search engines use to determine the overall quality of your blog post. Readability is more than proper spelling and grammar – it’s how your content looks on a screen too.
Readers scan on the web, they don’t tend to read every word. So, big blocks of text do not tend to be user-friendly, especially on mobile screens. White space, headings, and subheadings break up large blocks of text to help make your content easy to read and more user-friendly. This can be the difference between a user staying to engage with your content or bouncing off your site.
Keeping things concise helps with readability, but it also helps your readers get the most out of your posts. No one wants to read a lot of fluff and fill before getting to the meat of the post. Keeping your posts concise and to the point is also one of the ways to get your content noticed.
Mistake #4 – Skimping on Quality
It’s easy for businesses to get caught up on meeting an end goal of publishing “x” number of blog posts a month and start to skimp on quality. Sure, the more blog posts you publish on a monthly basis, the more traffic you will tend to build to your website over time.
However, quality matters. If you’re not publishing well-researched, relevant, and high-quality content, you are doing your business a disservice. Instead, figure out a publishing schedule that works for you.
You’ll want to figure out how many posts you can realistically create in a month without sacrificing quality and then create an editorial calendar based on that. This will help to keep you on track with a consistent publishing schedule and with producing quality content that serves your readers and helps your business.
Mistake #5 – Skipping SEO
SEO is important for pretty much anything you publish on the web. With millions of blog posts published every day, the content landscape is highly competitive. So, you need to make sure you’re doing what you can to give your content the best shot, which means implementing SEO best practices across your website and within your content.
Checking your optimizations is one of the things you should do before publishing a blog post. As your blog posts build and become more established, it will help increase traffic to your site overall. In order for your content to be viewed as authoritative, you need to make sure your website is designed and built to support that traffic and encourage user engagement.
There are a lot of factors that go into a strong website. Some of them are front-facing, meaning users see and interact with them, and a bunch of them are behind-the-scenes in the way your site is built and how it functions. All of them have to work together in order for your website to provide the most benefit to your business that it can.
When it comes to blog posts and page content, focusing on a few major elements of on-page SEO can help you cover the basics. Implementing good SEO in the headings, URL, images, links, meta-data, and more of your blog post is a great start. This will give your post a better chance of showing up in search engines when potential customers are searching than it would have had otherwise.
Mistake #6 – Not Planning for Promotion
Many businesses that jump into blogging make the mistake of thinking the work is done once you hit “publish”. Big brands that already have a ton of authority and international recognition may be able to get away with that every once in a while, but most brands can’t. Because there is so much content out there, you can’t rely on well-written content and SEO alone to get readers to see it – you have to promote your content as well.
An easy way to start promoting your content is to share it on your social media profiles. This can help get more eyes on your content, especially if you add some paid social advertising into the mix. For example, using a small budget to boost your posts on Facebook can exponentially increase their reach. If you have an email newsletter, incorporating your blog posts into them is another way to promote your content. Outreach to influencers and thought leaders in your industry is more time-consuming, but can provide great results.
Another thing to consider is that content promotion is not a once-and-done thing; it should be ongoing. You should be allocating some time and effort into revisiting blog posts, improving them, and continuing to promote them. This will help keep your older blog content updated and fresh while also boosting engagement on them as you continue to share and promote them.
Blogging for your business can help increase traffic to your website over time. When that traffic gets to your website, is your site helping or hurting you? If your website needs some work, contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to get it back on track.