9 Business Blogging Mistakes To Avoid Like The Plague.

The question I frequently get reminded of is ‘Am I blogging for fun or am I doing it for business?’ Blogging is fun and there is nothing wrong with using our own personality in our blogs, wherever we possibly can. As a matter of fact, this is something that I really recommend you to do. But the thing is, the scope of blogging is so immense that sometimes we bloggers tend to forget that it can be one of the best business tools.

Ways of conducting businesses have changed a lot here recently. In the past, your potential clients came to your doors but nowadays they can directly come to your website from the comfort of their home. The compulsion of getting into yellow pages to advertize your business is nearly the thing of the past. Nowadays, you need to be ranked on top of the search engines like Google. But getting on the top of the search engines requires you to be doing a lot of things right. It requires you to be the answer not just a business trying to make money.

You probably know all this already but it is worth getting reminded again. A blog helps you engage with your customers and potential clients in a deeper level. It facilitates to drive traffic to you business. It makes you visible in search engine results when your potential clients look for related search queries. It assists you to go way beyond what you can do without a site or even with just a static site. Your clients are highly likely to find you before they find your competition due to your blog. This is why a blog is a valuable asset for your business. Its potential is huge because it helps you be the answer to people’s problems as well as make money from the effort.

This is the newest craze that can get you more clients and more money but you should definitely know what blogging really is and if it is right for you. Blogging is not for all businesses but if you can integrate it in yours, it could take your business to a whole new level. But, like I said this is not for everyone. Before you start a blog, you need to be clear about what your plans and intentions are with blogging. If you don’t know whether blogging is right for you or not, be sure to check out my recent post 9 Fundamentals To Know Before You Start A Blog.

If done the right way from the start, your blog can bring in great rewards for your business. It aids tremendously in creating a fan base, followers, regular audience; turns them into clients and in turn helps attract new customers. And most important of all, blogging could be the best way to compete with the big dawgs in your business even if you are a small business or just a business start-up.

Yeah! Blogging can do all that. But, if you make some major mistakes from the start, you are literally killing your business even before starting it. You can also lose a lot of your existing customers if you already have a business. Therefore, there are some snags that you should definitely avoid at all costs if you are blogging for business.

So how do you start on the right track to increase your chances of building a successful business with blogging? To help you start on the right track let me present to you the 9 business blogging mistakes that you should definitely avoid like you would avoid the plague:

1. Not showing your true personality:

Bloggers trace their own path to success and oftentimes they also block their own success path. One major way to obstruct your own blogging success is by not being yourself.

At the start of this post, I highly recommended you to shower your personality in your blog. The best way to show personality is to talk about your own experience in your business endeavors. This makes your perspective unique and same goes with your blog. This is what makes your readers trust you and in turn get more attached to you. Your own experience relating to the message you are trying to convey is what creates a loyal following. And this could really help you stand out amongst your competition.

We all have our own way of conversing but it is important to know never to be too formal in blogs. I don’t know if you ever notice or not but people do relate to you more when you are casual in your conversation. Same principle applies in blogging.

Relevancy is important but it is okay to present some new and interesting topics every now and then. Even a post relating to your personal life is alright once in a while. This also helps strengthen that bond between you (your business) and your audience.

2. Not giving readers reasons to follow you:

Being yourself is the first in the line in terms of giving your readers reasons to follow you religiously. But there are other things that need to be taken into consideration too.

One such thing is the trust factor. And there are numerous ways you can gain as well as lose the trust. This is crucial because a trust is harder to gain but is very easy to lose. One way to gain trust is by continuously giving out tips and advice that are relevant and practical yet, simple enough for your readers to follow.

A blog is a discussion platform where you can easily connect with your audience and hopefully turn them into regular visitors and clients. So, it really matters what you publish in your blog. That is why it is necessary to go above and beyond in giving value to your audience. The principle here is, if they don’t trust you, they are not going to follow you or buy anything from you.

And then there is honesty. If you think about it, no matter what you write in your blog or how good you write it, that is only a part of the complete parcel. The complete parcel here would be how your audience perceives you. You are definitely going to lose the trust if you are not honest in what you talk about. Blogging is a great way to improve your approach in doing business. But if you lie, you are going to miss that awesome opportunity to learn. You see, karma always comes back to bite you in the rear end (O: Doesn’t it?

3. Not being a regular contributor:

This is related to not giving the reasons for your readers to follow you. However, I believe this deserves to be a point on its own.

One of the hardest thing about blogging is being regular and consistent. You can burn out, run out of ideas, face with personal circumstances. I know this because I have been through it all and I also know that I will be facing more such things in the future.

Being consistent with publishing quality content and regular interactions is crucial. This is what helps to gather visitors to your site and over time they will become your biggest fans. This is also critical in landing clients for your business.

Being consistent on writing content can be stressful so you need to brainstorm ideas for your posts ahead of time and not wait for the 11^th hour to create a post. You can also reach out to other people to help you write in your blog. You will be surprised how good this works. Another tactic I personally use is to look for inspiration and ideas on other media like TV, magazines and newspapers.

When I was providing services in this blog, I got very busy with it; to a point where creating content and regular interaction was no longer on top of my list. Well for a while I thought it was okay because money was coming in. But afterwards my blogging side got severely affected which in turn also hampered my business side of blogging. So let me tell you, if you blog for business, blogging should still be the first priority no matter what.

4. Not promoting your blog and blog posts:

The main purpose of blogging for business is to land customers through your blog. If you really don’t want others to read or make it easy for them to read your blog, what is the point? If you really think about it, all that hard work you invested on would be in vain if your potential audience can’t get to what you have published.

For a business blog to succeed and reap maximum benefits, you need to regularly promote the heck out of your blog as well as the new content you write. One fun way of promoting what you write is using social media outlets like Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter etc. To make it easy for promotion, have social buttons readily available in your blog and posts. This makes it easy on your readers as they don’t have to hunt the outlets down when they want to share about your awesome post.

Another cool way of promoting your blog and your new posts is by commenting on other blogs. This is also a cheap way to advertize your business and bring in new readers and clients. And then there are other ways of promotion like business cards, word of mouth, email signatures and basically providing your blog wherever you possibly can.

One simple way of promoting what you write is making your RSS button visible in your blog so that people can subscribe to it and read your latest contents in their RSS reader.

5. Not allowing and encouraging comments:

Blogging is a conversation and the more conversation you have the better you can expand your business potential. Moreover, conversation is the only way to connect with like minded people who may also turn out to be your potential customers.

Hence, if you are seriously blogging for business, enable your comments. You might possess the fear of being criticized but that is okay. You should always welcome criticism as it only helps to better yourself and those reading your blog. Besides, criticism is the best way to get noticed in the blogosphere where a lot of people have the ‘YES SIR’..’YES SIR’..mentality.

Just yesterday, I landed on a business blog with some powerful content but was surprised that the comment section was disabled. The blogger mentioned that comment was a waste of time and affected the SEO ranking of his site. Waste of time, I totally disagree. As I mentioned, blog is a conversation and without being able to communicate efficiently how are you going to land clients.

About the SEO part I believe it works the other way. I have seen my blog posts climb up in the search results in less than 24 hours due to the relevant keywords my commentators used.

Conversation only occurs when you get involved so always reply to your comments as best you can. The posts that create more conversation are the ones where you really stimulate your readers to comment. So, for encouraging comments, all it may take is couple of questions especially at the end of your posts. I have also found out that the more complete a post is, the less interactions I get. Sounds weird but incomplete and controversial posts are the ones that gather more conversation.

6. Too much marketing of your products and services:

Being overly promotional is the sure-fire way to kill your business. This is a bad business practice and it is not going to work out for you in this day and age where the competition is just too fierce. Trying to sell products and services every time in your posts can seriously affect your marketing approach.

The era where people buy your products and services based simply on colorful ads and excess promotion is almost over. That is plain old ‘trying to shove it down their throat’ approach. Would you buy my products and services if you notice me trying to shove it down your throat? I don’t think so. People like to be slowly coaxed into buying products and services. Nobody is going to buy nothing from you if they feel like you are forcing it on them. You need subtle push not shove it down the throat approach.

One major key is building the relationship first. If you are trying to sell something without building trust, your readers are never going to buy anything from you. So, you have to first build trust by regular interaction and providing relevant and useful information. If you use this marketing technique you are definitely going to gain more readers as well as potential clients.

7. Not having patience and perseverance:

If you think blogging is easy, trust me it is not easy. It is hard work which requires utmost patience, perseverance and being extra creative.

It takes time to get the ball rolling and the momentum going in any business and same goes with your business blogging endeavor as well. It takes time to be successful. It takes a lot to gather readers and build a community.

While starting a blog for business, you may get demotivated and frustrated because you don’t see instant results. The only way you are going to be successful at it is if you know that you are in it for a long haul and it requires your utmost energy, patience and perseverance.

One approach that I am a big fan of is the smart goal setting. Through this you can have a great idea of what you want to attain through your business. This also involves by when you want to attain your goals and how you are going to do it. When you run out of patience, this approach helps you work on your goals effectively so that you can actually get every little things done and get motivated to go further.

8. Not being professional:

Being an expert in your field is not an easy feat and without being professional, you are never going to get there. I am not trying to discourage you here but if you have content that don’t provide any value to the readers, that is not being professional.

I do see a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in some of the blogs I visit. Oftentimes, spelling and grammar mistakes results into making no sense in what we are trying to relay or may even give a negative sense. I know I am not perfect in doing things right here either but the thing is, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It is about doing the best we can.

Some simple techniques like taking time to go over your content and reviewing it couple of times before publishing it really helps. Or you can even use popular software like Microsoft word which automatically shows your spelling and grammar mistakes.

9. Not using and linking keywords effectively:

Another huge business blog killer is keyword stuffing. I frequently see businesses stuffing keywords in their blogs in order to get ranked higher. Well, in the early internet days, this technique was widely used but nowadays search engines penalize you for doing this. You might get penalized to a point where your site would be banned from search results until you fix the problems.

On the flip side, I have also seen many just talk about products, services or business but provide no link to it. Even if the products are advertized in banners or at the side bar, you need to link to it so that your readers can simply just click on it and get there. It is all about making it easy and convenient for your readers. You know what I mean!

Blogging is a cheap way to advertize your business. But once plagued by these mistakes from early on, you can never take your blog into higher grounds. These business blogging mistakes should always be avoided. That way you will see the gain in your traffic, community and in turn your business. These mistakes can be costly so pay attention to these and approach your business blogging venture the SMART way.

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Here’s to your successful online business endeavor!

-Adam Paudyal.

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