Blogging is no longer just for the hobbyist. These days, blogging is an invaluable tool for businesses to build authority, boost visibility, and facilitate customer engagement. Blogging can have a real, positive bottom-line impact—and business owners know it. They are flocking to the blog as a customer outreach tool like never before, bolstered by statistics like these recently published by Hubspot:

• B2B companies that blog receive 67 percent more leads than those that do not blog.
• Marketers who prioritize blogging enjoy 13x the ROI.
• Companies that blog receive 97 percent more links to their websites!
• Blogs are ranked as one of the most trusted sources of information on the Web.

All of this speaks to a basic truth: Blogging can be great for your business. This is by no means a given, though. For blogging to be effective, you actually have to do it properly—yet blogging poorly is all too easy to do.

In order to ensure the effectiveness of your business blog, then, it’s important that you identify some of the most common blogging errors—and that you avoid them at all costs.

How Blogging Gets Blundered

A few of those all-too-prevalent blogging blunders include:

• Writing inconsistently. Your blog is like a content-eating beast that needs to be fed on a regular basis. Nobody said you had to blog daily or even weekly—but blogging three times in one day then letting the blog sit, without any updates, for weeks or months at a time is only going to madden your readers and lose your audience.
• Not augmenting your blogs. A blog is about much more than just the words on the page. It’s also about rich content embedded within the post—compelling images, relevant infographics, related videos, full SEO optimization, and the like. Posting blogs without taking the time to augment and enrich them is a big missed opportunity.
• Writing to nobody in particular. Do you know who your audience is? Hopefully, the answer is yes. Hopefully, you have buyer personas you can fall back on, ensuring that you are writing with your readers’ specific needs and values in mind. Otherwise, your blogs will be too general or too unfocused to do anybody much good.
• Keeping your posts to yourself. What’s the first thing you should do after posting a new blog entry? The answer is to share it—on social media, via email, etc. If you’re not sharing your posts, you cannot expect to get much traction or engagement. An “if I build it they will come” mentality simply doesn’t work with blogging. In a sense, you have to market and promote the blog itself.
• Writing about old, tired topics. There’s something to be said for recycling your best topics, coming at them again and again from different angles—but if a topic obviously falls flat, there’s little sense in trying to make something out of it. Move on to the next thing.

Blogging can be an effective tool, especially when it’s pulled into a broader, integrative marketing approach—but all of this hinges on you blogging rightly. To learn more about doing so, or to have a conversation about what integrated marketing means, don’t hesitate to give our team a call today.