The 11 business blogging mistakes to avoid

For small businesses, starting a blog is one of the best ways to help set yourself apart from the competition – an opportunity to show off your expertise, to add a human element to your brand and at its simplest, an extra way to communicate with your customers. Crack SEO and you can reach a whole new audience, busy searching for the very services that you offer. As long as you avoid the big blogging mistakes that can turn your audience off.

 

So, if you’re wondering how to start a successful business blog – or why your business blog isn’t a success – take a look at our checklist of things to avoid when blogging about your business.

 

Writing for yourself

One of the joys of writing a blog is the freedom to post whatever you want. But if you want people to read it, you have to write with others in mind. Start by working out your target audience: what will they be looking for, what level of understanding or expertise do they already have?

 

Whether you’re positioning yourself as an expert in your field or offering simple solutions to help others, always start with the goal of your end reader.

 

Making it a sales pitch

One of the most common blogging mistakes is making it all about the hard sell. There’s little point to a business blog if it doesn’t help your business – but that doesn’t mean constantly pushing your own services. Ask yourself why the reader will want to finish the post… and more importantly, why will they want to come back to read more?

 

Being entertaining is always a bonus but you don’t want simply to be adding to the noise. Instead, focus on helping solve a particular problem, add insight and expertise (whether it’s your own or from others), use facts and figures so the reader comes away more informed.

 

Losing focus

It’s tempting to cover as much ground as possible in your blog posts, appealing to many different readers and casting your net as widely as you can. But it’s better to focus on a single area, to go into more detail and be able to provide more specifics than a very general overview.

 

Someone offering coaching services should target the specific issues they help with, rather than every problem that might require a coach, for example. A financial adviser should focus a blog on one area of advice, whether that’s mortgages, pensions, investments or something else, rather than the whole world of money.

 

Overstuffing your SEO

There’s no denying that SEO is important – unless you have a huge following on social media (and probably even then), you’ll want search engines to rank your content and help new readers discover your business.

 

So, it’s tempting to stuff your keywords and key phrases in as many times as possible, shoehorning in every variation that someone might be searching for.

 

The actual result will be stilted tortured content that verges on the unreadable. It won’t appeal to humans and search engines are sophisticated enough to recognise this approach, so far from benefiting, you’ll be relegated below other sites designed to have a much better user experience.

 

There’s far more to say about SEO – easily worth a blog post (or more likely a whole book) of its own. If you’re new to the subject, start by finding the keywords people search for on your topic, and ideally use them in the URL, title and opening paragraphs as well as naturally in the post and any headers, and in alt-text of images.

 

A half-hearted headline

We’re all bombarded with information from every avenue these days, so one of the trickiest parts of blogging is persuading your reader to click onto the post. And without a great headline, it’s easy for your perfect customer to scroll straight past.

Ask yourself why the reader will want to finish the post…

Beware of clickbait and over-promising though: provoking a reader’s curiosity is a great start but you’ll need to deliver to avoid them clicking back off seconds later.

 

It’s best to be straightforward rather than too clever as well: if you’re hoping for search engines to rank your content, cunning puns and esoteric references are no match for targeted keywords.

 

Misjudging the length

Sometimes a query can be answered in a single sentence. But being too concise isn’t the route to success – the average blog post is now over 1,000 words.

 

Aim for an absolute minimum of 500 words if you want more chance of search engines picking up your post, and to help keep readers on your website for longer. If you can’t reach 500 words without repeating yourself and pointlessly waffling, reconsider your topic.

 

But unless you have a dedicated following already, or you’re tackling a subject where there’s genuinely a lot to say, don’t make your post too long either – if the word count is spiralling into the thousands, consider whether it would be better split into several shorter posts and linked together.

 

Being too formal

The big benefit of your own business blog is being able to speak directly to your customers – so don’t write it as if you were preparing a formal business document.

 

It’s easy to slip into jargon as well, but throwing around too many acronyms and insider references is off-putting unless you’re targeting a specific informed audience.

 

Forgetting images

It’s not just that images look good on the page. The right photos or illustrations will add to your content, providing additional information or reinforcing your credibility.

 

When you’re writing longer posts, they also help break up long sections of text to make it all easier to read and more memorable.

 

As above, they’re also useful for SEO – alt-text is designed for accessibility, to describe the image to the visually impaired, but can also include keywords.

 

Publishing too fast

You’ve followed all the tips above, written content that you’re sure will appeal to readers, will give your business a boost, ticked all the boxes of a great post. So, the next step is to publish it straight away, right?

 

No… At the very least, allow a break between writing and re-reading to see what mistakes there might be and to improve the post. Ideally you want someone else to proofread it, a completely fresh pair of eyes to check everything makes sense and that there are no basic errors.

 

If you don’t have a proofreader on hand, put it to one side and return to it fresh. Are you sure of the facts? Is it spellchecked – for typos as well as those words you might easily confuse? Do you repeat yourself? Could a sentence be clearer?

 

Readers might forgive the occasional mistake but a blog post littered with errors is unlikely to convince.

 

Publishing erratically

Consistency is important, both in terms of search engines picking up your latest posts as well as readers knowing when to expect something new. So, publishing five new posts in a week then nothing for the rest of the month doesn’t help.

 

The trick is to find the balance that works for your business: you don’t want to be writing something for the sake of having a new post live but waiting until you have something to say means you can end up with big gaps between content as your business blog slips down the To-Do list.

 

An editorial calendar can help, so you have ideas planned out weeks in advance: jot down every idea and inspiration you have, think of all the angles for topics to explore and you won’t be puzzling over a blank page each time you start to type.

 

And if you know that publishing is certain to fall by the wayside as the day-to-day business takes over, consider outsourcing it.

 

Forgetting to promote

If you write it, they will come? No, probably not. Even the most dedicated fans of your business will need reminding, so the next step is to share it on social media and in email newsletters.

 

Not just once either. Tweets have a lifespan of between about 15 and 20 minutes, so if you share it once, only a fraction of your followers are ever likely to see it.

 

Other social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram have a longer lifespan than Twitter, but algorithms limit the number of people they’ll show content to initially – and of those who scroll past, only a percentage will stop to look, while even fewer will click to read.

 

On the plus side, if you’re wondering how to fill your social media calendar, each blog post can be broken down to make multiple pieces of content to share.

 

For more tips on how to build your brand on social media check out this post