We're not trying to shame anyone here, but there is a way to do business blogging right, and there is a way to do business blogging wrong. The wrong way to do it would be making at least one of the seven business blogging mistakes below. By making at least one of these mistakes, you aren't doing it right, and your blogging efforts may not be getting the full return they possibly could.
- No Social Sharing Buttons - In this day and age, how can your business blog not have any social sharing buttons? Even if you are a B2B company, wouldn't you want to give readers the option to share your great content with coworkers and colleagues? It's not as if everyone folks are connected with on social media are family and drinking buddies. Besides, social proof goes a long way in engaging people, and lack of social sharing buttons means a lack of social proof. The phrase "build it and they will come" does not apply, and social sharing buttons makes it that much easier to get people to come.
- No Email Subscription Option - The businesses who have business blogs want people to read their posts, right? If this is your business, then you need to make it easy for readers (i.e potential customers) to subscribe to your blog, and an email subscription option is the best way to do that. With an email subscription option, every new post will be delivered into the inboxes of subscribers, which should only boost the amount of traffic your blog gets.
- No Pictures - This is probably one of the simplest mistakes to avoid, but a lot of business blogs fail to do this. A picture not only makes the post more visually appealing, but it's also one more thing on the page you can optimize for search engines. Why miss out on the opportunity, when stock photos from Creative Commons or Dreamstime will suffice? Oh, when you do include a picture, make sure to put it on the right. Folks read from right to left, so putting a picture on the left messes up that process. This is trick we learned just a few weeks ago.
- Not Publishing Often Enough - As a bare minimum, businesses should be publishing once a week, although twice a week is optimum. Anything less than that, and you minus well not have a blog. Publishing often means that your site is going to be crawled by search engines that much more often, which means your newest pages get indexed faster and you have that many more pages to rank and to get found for. Publishing often also means that you can keep readers engaged much more regularly. Publishing often also means that you have that much more content to engage readers with (and to use to create other content marketing offers, such as eBooks and white papers).
- Posts Too Short - A lot of folks may not know this, as its part of Google's latest algorithm changes, but search engines now prefer that posts be between 600 and 800 words. The previous benchmark of 300 to 500 words isn't good enough anymore. The reason for the change is that search engines want to give users content that's relevant and of value to their queries, and it's hard to deliver that value and relevance in 400 words. Also, you have to really try to write 600 words, and search engines want to favor content that is written for human and is written to provide something of value. You have to really try to do all three, while it's easy to spin together 350 words that's designed to make a search engine happy.
- Posts Too Promotional - Here's an example of a business blog that is way too self-promotional. Nearly every post is either about the company or mentions the company and/or its services. Not only are these posts incredibly boring because they really don't say anything except "buy our service", but they don't provide anything of value. The posts don't really show potential customers how they solve their pain points, or even an understanding of what those pain points are. The posts especially don't illustrate how the company is a thought leader in their industry by providing any new information and/or opinions.
- Lack of Formatting - No one wants to read that's just words and sentences and paragraphs without anything to break it up. It's too overwhelming on first glance, and there isn't anything there to indicate what's in the article and whether it's for them. This is where formatting, such as subheadings, lists, bullet points, all come into play. An easy way to get started with is to give each paragraph (besides the introduction and the conclusion) a subheading, one that summarizes what's in the coming paragraph. Not only do those subheadings make the article that much easier to digest, but each subheading is also one more opportunity to include a keyword. Keywords in subheadings give search engines a better idea of what the article is about.
