Is Your Business Blog Conveying the Wrong Message?
Business blogging is highly recommended for any business that is looking to improve upon its SEO efforts, social media efforts, and online marketing efforts overall. For SEO purposes, a blog post is an opportunity to target relevant keywords. Each blog post is a new page of content on the website and can rank in the search engines over time.
Every time a new post, or page, is added to the website the search engine spiders will come back to crawl and index the site. The search engines favor sites that include “fresh” content. Blog posts also serve as content that can be shared in social media. A social media profile is only beneficial if it’s active and posting content that will keep followers engaged and generate a response.
While many businesses have incorporated blogs onto their website, they aren’t all going about business blogging the right way. Here are 3 business blogging mistakes that can send the wrong message to website visitors:
Don’t Let Your Blog Become Inactive
It’s actually worse to have a blog that sits inactive as opposed to having no blog at all. It’s likely that a blog on a website has prominent placement within the navigation of the website. This means that anyone that visits the website is likely to find the blog and click over to it. Blog visitors will expect to see current information that gives them a glimpse into your company.
If they land on the blog only to see that the last post was from three months ago, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Depending on the industry, the topic could now be outdated. It also just looks unprofessional. Business blogs should be updated once a week, at the very least. Adding a post every business day is ideal, but sometimes there simply aren’t the resources to do so. Commit to consistency and your blog will be better off.
Posting Content that isn’t On Brand
Most businesses set up a blog with the best of intentions, but then realize how much work blogging actually involves. This is when business bloggers tend to get complacent, and might start posting content that had been outsourced. The issue with this is that the content could be off-brand, and the majority of posts aren’t unique or original. Instead, the blogger curates the work of others by writing a brief intro to another blog post and linking over to it or relying too heavily on “best of” blog posts.
Sure, these kinds of posts may keep the blog active but the content really isn’t useful to target audience members. Blog visitors want to know what you have to say, not what others have to say. Another “lazy” strategy is to accept too many guest blog posts. Guest posts are fine, to an extent, but if the majority of posts are guest posts it diminishes the brand entity of your blog.
Incorporating Ads Within the Content
If your blog has gained a following and gets a respectable amount of visits per month you may be tempted to monetize the blog by incorporating ads. While there is nothing wrong with this approach for a professional blogger (that relies on the blog for income), it’s not recommended for a business blog. Ads are essentially a distraction to the visitor. If they click on an ad they have left your site, and may never return. It’s more important to focus on getting blog visitors to visit other pages of the site in order to convert.
Of course, it is definitely a good idea to have a business blog. However, it will only help your business if you do it right. Otherwise, your content could be sending the wrong message.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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