In digital marketing, a well-crafted business blog can be a powerful tool for enhancing brand visibility, engaging with a target audience, and driving valuable traffic to your website. However, even the most seasoned bloggers can fall prey to common pitfalls that hinder the success of their efforts. Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or just stepping into business blogging, steering clear of these mistakes is crucial for maintaining a solid online presence and achieving your marketing goals.
Here, we’ll delve into the intricacies of effective business blogging and explore how to sidestep the pitfalls that could compromise your blog’s impact.
Table of Contents
The importance of a business blog
7 common blogging mistakes and how to avoid them
Next steps
The importance of a business blog
A business blog is a great way to connect with your audience and can play a significant role in a business’s marketing strategy. Not sure if you should start a business blog? First read our 7 reasons your business needs a blog, which covers the fiscal benefits of running a business-related blog.
7 common blogging mistakes and how to avoid them
Now that you understand how blogging stands to help, let’s talk about some of the most common blogging mistakes and how to avoid them:
1. Not committing wholeheartedly
Not every business will have a blog, but if you do, committing to regularly posting is essential. Consistent blog posting plays a crucial role in sustaining and enhancing reader engagement and positively impacts SEO.
Solution: Maintain consistency
Creating a content calendar is a great place to start when it comes to ensuring consistency with blog posting. A content calendar allows you to organize topics, plan ahead, and coordinate with team members involved in content creation.
But having a content calendar doesn’t necessarily ensure you post regularly – you also have to stick to it. Consider getting ahead on creating content or creating content in batches to ensure content goes out on time. You can also consider using content scheduling tools.
Additional tip: It’s always more important to focus on quality over quantity, so be realistic with your posting schedule to ensure you can maintain quality.
2. Not considering readability
These days, readers tend to have short attention spans, so it’s critical to ensure your blog is easy to read, keeping readers engaged and on the page. According to Hubspot, 73% of readers admit to skimming blog posts, while the average reader spends 96 seconds reading the average blog, according to Site Meter stats.
Solution: Follow principles to make blogs skimmable
- Use clear headings and subheadings: Break your content into sections with descriptive subheadings to help readers quickly identify the topics they’re interested in
- Bullet points and numbered lists: Use bullet points and numbered lists to present information concisely and in a scannable format. Additionally, lists make it easy for readers to grasp key points.
- Short Paragraphs: Keep paragraphs short and focused. Long blocks of text can be intimidating, so aim for 2-3 sentences per paragraph.
- Bold and italic text: Emphasize important words or phrases using bold or italic text. However, be selective and avoid overusing these styles.
- Block quotes: Use block quotes to highlight key insights or quotes from experts
- Clickable table of contents: Include a clickable table of contents at the beginning of long articles to allow readers to jump to the sections that interest them the most
- Summary or TL;DR section: Consider adding a “Summary” or “Too long; didn’t read” section at the beginning, offering a concise overview of the main points.
- Mobile optimization: Ensure your blog is mobile-responsive, making it easy to read on various devices.
- Consistent formatting: Maintain a consistent formatting style throughout your blog. Consistency makes your content predictable and user-friendly.
3. Focusing on promotional content
New business bloggers may think about their blog as a self-promotion tool. While it can be, a blog is so much more than that, and content should be focused on providing value to potential customers rather than concentrating on self-accolades.
Solution: Focus on customer-focused content
Take the time to think about your target audience and the type of content they are seeking. One way to think about this is the types of questions customers often have about your business’s products and services.
Want to learn more about creating quality content? Read more here.
4. Not revisiting old content
Unfortunately, blogging isn’t just writing it and forgetting it. Revisiting previously published content and updating can help your blog succeed by ensuring that content is relevant and up to date. Refreshing content also signals to Google that it’s fresh, improving search engine optimization (SEO) – see tip #7 below for more on this.
Solution: Set a specific timeframe for revision
To ensure content continually gets revised, it can be helpful to incorporate this into your content calendar and set a specific timeframe to take time to adjust previously published content. For example, taking time to update new blogs at the same time every year.
Note that if there is nothing to update in your content, you can add new information, change images, or add an infographic, so Google will continue to crawl these pages.
5. Not tracking progress
The point of your blogs is to get readers to your website and encourage them to take action, so if you’re not tracking your blogs’ progress to see if they’re reaching your audience, you are missing out on valuable information.
Solution: Understand blog metrics to improve content
Take the time to familiarize yourself with Google Analytics and other tracking tools. Use these tools to track metrics like page views, unique users, bounce rate, time on page, etc., determining which blogs are performing well and which don’t need updating.
6. Not sharing blog content
As we mentioned, blogging isn’t just writing and then forgetting about it. Promoting the content is essential to getting blogs in front of the right audience.
Solution: Learn where to share content once it’s published
Where you promote content can vary depending on where the best place to find your audience is. Generally, blog promotion is best achieved via social media, email marketing, online ads, and community engagement. Learn more about blog promotion here.
Want to learn more about email marketing as a means for blog promotion? Learn more here.
7. Not thinking about search engine optimization
When a search engine like Google indexes a blog, search engine optimization (SEO) impacts the page’s ranking, which is defined by how visible it will be to those searching for content.
Additionally, one of the reasons why blogging can be so helpful as a marketing strategy is that it improves your entire website’s SEO. A blog does this by increasing the indexed pages on your website, allowing you to optimize for more keywords.
So, not thinking about SEO when brainstorming blog ideas and writing blog content is a big miss.
Solution: Understand SEO best practices
You can plan your content strategy by understanding the types of content that perform well for specific keywords and adapt your ideas accordingly. It also helps you discover the specific words and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for information related to your industry, products, or services. These keywords can then serve as the basis for generating blog topic ideas.
Keeping SEO in mind when creating blog content is also critical. Click here to learn more about how to optimize blogs for SEO.
Next steps
Now that you have learned some of the most common blogging mistakes, you can ensure to avoid them with your business blog. If you already have an established blog, it may be time to think about some of these things – have you recently updated published blog content? Have you reviewed blogs for SEO? Have you considered the best places to promote your blog or established an email marketing list?
For more tips on how to optimize your ecommerce experience, browse related blogs on Alibaba.com Reads.
