17 Mistakes Professionals Make With Their Blogs

By Denise Wake­man

Are you get­ting results from your busi­ness blog? Is it get­ting harder for you to spend time on your blog because you’re just not see­ing how it is going to pay off? If so, you’re not alone. Hun­dreds of blogs are started each day and many of them are aban­doned after sev­eral months because it takes time and energy to keep a good busi­ness blog going.

Make no mis­take, blogs are a great tool for build­ing com­mu­nity, inter­act­ing with poten­tial clients, and mar­ket­ing your ser­vices. And, it’s not enough to set one up and post occa­sion­ally. You have to use it effec­tively to drive traf­fic and gain readership.

We’ve dis­cov­ered sev­eral com­mon mis­takes pro­fes­sion­als make with their blogs. Mostly, they aren’t using some the fea­tures avail­able to them with their blog­ging soft­ware, because it hasn’t been suf­fi­ciently explained. Eyes glaze over with the men­tion of RSS, ping­ing, track­backs and perma­links. Pro­fes­sion­als may be ignor­ing these things, hop­ing they don’t really need to know. But they do if they want results from their busi­ness blog.

Here’s a list of what we found on a recent trip around the pro­fes­sional busi­ness blogosphere:

Con­tent:

1. Not post­ing fre­quently enough. (Rec­om­mended: 2–3 times a week.)

2. Con­tent is not focused, and the tar­get audi­ence is not clearly defined.

3. Post­ing arti­cles that are too long, instead of using extended post features.

4. Not link­ing pro­fusely (because the pro­fes­sional isn’t research­ing their field on the internet).

5. Poor spelling, bad gram­mar and typos.

Design

6. No name of author in tag line or on side bar.

7. No author photo.

8. No sig­na­ture or name in the footer; no way to tell who wrote post on a multi-author site.

9. No sub­scrip­tion form; no way to get blog updates through RSS or email.

10. No way for read­ers to leave com­ments and use trackbacks.

11. Too many cat­e­gories or none at all.

12. No infor­ma­tion about their busi­ness ser­vices and products.

13. Cal­en­dars for no rea­son at all (what is the point of those cal­en­dars anyway?).

Mar­ket­ing

14. Blog isn’t sub­mit­ted to blog directories.

15. Not ping­ing each time a new post is published.

16. Not using track­backs refer­ring or link­ing to other blogs.

17. No blogroll or list of favorite blogs or websites.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing using a blog to build your busi­ness, opti­mize it by tak­ing time to learn the fea­tures and steps that will ensure suc­cess. A blog is like any other mar­ket­ing tool — you’ve got to use it cor­rectly to get pos­i­tive results.

Here are a cou­ple of suggestions:

1. Get an ebook and take the time to learn about your blog soft­ware or host­ing provider.

2. Hire a pro­fes­sional blog expert to coach you on how to rev up your blog.