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Top 8 Blogging Mistakes That Can Stall Your Business Growth

  • October 24 2014
  • Comments Off on Top 8 Blogging Mistakes That Can Stall Your Business Growth
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Likely, when you first started your blog, it was for the purpose of growing your business. Having quality content on your blog can help draw in traffic and boost your SEO rankings. However, if you’re seeing the exact opposite, it could be due to common blogging mistakes that new and small businesses make. A lot of the blogging mistakes that people make can be prevented and easily fixed when needed. So don’t fret if you are guilty of one of the following mistakes, because there is a solution.

 

Not Placing Your Blog on Your Web Site

If you have a blog that was designed for your business, then wouldn’t it make sense to put it on the Web site where people can easily find it? A lot of newbies make the mistake of assigning a completely different domain to their blog, or worse, using a free blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger. This is all right for personal blogs, but when it comes to the world of business, it’s all about professionalism. By placing your blog onto your Web site, you can give your visitors easy access to your content, plus it’ll help your SEO and build your brand.The way to fix this is to transfer your blog onto a subdomain of your main Web site (would look like www.blog.website.com) or within one of your main Web site’s folders (would look like www.website.com/blog). Either one of these options can be used to enable your Web site to benefit from the SEO advantages your blog offers.

 

Your Content is Too Promotional Too Often

The purpose of a blog is to provide readers with valuable information, entertainment, inspiration or all of the above. No one wants to come to a blog that only talks about a product or service that a business offers. Unless you own a blog that is focused on company news or products, then your content should offer something of value to your readers. No one wants to be advertised to too often and it’s rare for people to frequently visit a site that does this.  People like to go to blogs that give them something to look forward to each time they visit.  The fix for this is to write content on your blog that is insightful, educational or thought provoking. Of course, it should be related to your industry and cater to your particular audience.

 

Not Producing Enough Content

Like with a television program that airs at specific times and days of the week, it’s important that blog posts have regularity. When you capture the attention of readers, it’s important to maintain their attention. The only way to do this is to continue giving them what they want on a regular basis. When your content is produced infrequently or inconsistently, it can make your blog unreliable and will quickly lose the interest of your readership, which can slow down incoming traffic. To fix this issue, it’s recommended that you sit down and schedule your content for the week or month (depending on how frequently you plan to post). Then write the content ahead of time and have it scheduled to post automatically or just stay on top of posting it on time. It’s a good rule of thumb to post at least one blog post per week.

 

Not Optimizing Your Blog Content

The great thing about blogs is that it enables you to create content regularly that is geared towards search engine optimization. When you don’t optimize your content, your search engine rankings won’t improve. This means you’re missing out on potential organic traffic that you could get with a high SEO rank. The more content you post that has relevant keywords, the better your chances of ranking highly for them. It’s important that you use a good SEO strategy for your blog. Don’t choose too many keyword terms and don’t overstuff the pages with them. You can work with a search engine expert who can help you to identify relevant keywords and show you how to implement them throughout the Web site and blog.

 

Not Using Social Media to Promote Your Content

You’ve set up your blog on a subdomain or folder within your main Web site and you post content regularly using a great SEO strategy. However, the traffic isn’t increasing quickly enough. One reason this could be is because you aren’t making use of social media to promote your content. When advertising your content, it’s important to do so in a place where a lot of people will see it. Everyone spends a lot of their day on social media, which means that you can obtain good reach whenever you post your content on your Facebook or Twitter accounts. All you have to do is create an account on social media networks like Google+ and Facebook and start building a presence. You should spend time interacting with people and gaining the trust of your audience. Simply opening an account and publishing content isn’t going to suffice. Put in an hour a day socializing and connecting on these networks to gain more followers.

 

Not Using Call to Actions in Your Posts

Even when you have a good amount of traffic coming into your Web site, what does this mean for your business? If people are coming to your blog, reading the content and leaving, then this isn’t going to help your sales. This is why it’s important to place CTAs (call-to-action) at the end of your posts, so that you can generate leads and boost your ROI. You can fix this by placing CTAs along the side and/or top of your blog. Complement this with CTAs within all of your blog posts.

 

You’re Not Looking at Your Blog’s Analytics

If you haven’t integrated Google Analytics into your blog yet, then you are missing out on excellent insight that can tell you where your blog is failing. Having a way to analyze your blog can help you to determine what blog posts are getting the most traffic and where people are going on your site. Analytics can also be used to determine the effectiveness of your CTAs. To get started with this, you should integrate Google Analytics and start paying attention to the data that it provides. The metrics that will give you the most insight include monthly visitors, subscribers, page views, comments, traffic-driving keywords, conversion rate and leads, inbound links and social media shares.

 

You Didn’t Implement Social Media Share Buttons

Word of mouth is one of the best ways to spread the word about a business and its products and services. For the Internet, word of mouth is social media. If you don’t have social media buttons on your blog, then people can’t share it with their family, friends and followers. This means you’re missing out on increasing your reach in the digital world. This is especially true if the majority of your target audience spends much of their day on social media. There are widgets and plugins that you can use to input social media buttons in the blog posts you create. Make sure to include buttons for social media networks that your audience uses.

 

There’s more to a blog than just creating one and posting content here and there. By avoiding these common blogging mistakes, you can increase your chances of building a bigger readership and possibly boosting your SEO rankings.

 

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Cameron Mackey

Cameron is the Content Manager for the Vorongo Blog. He has spent three years in various content marketing roles. When he is not working with Vorongo he enjoys photography and hiking.

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