Blogging is a time-tested digital marketing tactic that, when performed correctly by an amateur blogger or pro blogger, can help your business generate more leads and sales.
As you fill your business’s blog with high-quality posts, it will become a valuable resource for prospective customers.
Prospects will discover your blog when searching for relevant information, some of whom may proceed to make a purchase. If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, though, you should avoid making these 10 otherwise common mistakes.
1) Using a Different Domain Than Website
Avoid publishing your blog on a different domain than your business’s official website. Instead, publish it on the same domain as your business website.
Using a different domain confuses visitors as they navigate between your business’s digital properties. When visitors see a different domain in their web browser, they may assume the address is wrong.
Furthermore, search engines will treat your blog like an entirely different website if it uses a different domain, which may restrict its organic visibility and rankings.
Now, if your blog is focused on a niche outside of your business brand, then you’ll want to look at registering a domain for that blog.
You can register a domain at GoDaddy.
2) Focusing on Sales-Driven Posts
Another business blogging mistake to avoid is focusing on sales-driven posts.
Blogging is undoubtedly an effective way to increase sales, but this shouldn’t be the focus of your posts. If a post is nothing more than an advertisement for a product or service sold by your business, it probably won’t perform well.
People visit blogs to read and consume high-quality content. With overly commercialized posts, visitors may abandon your blog in search of content elsewhere.
3) Recycling Topics
A common challenge encountered by business owners who blog is coming up with new topics for posts.
As a result, some business owners recycle topics from their existing posts. If you’ve already covered a topic in a post, though, you shouldn’t cover it in another post.
Recycled topics such as this typically don’t perform well. Since they’ve already been covered, search engines may classify them as duplicate content.
The existing posts will still rank high, but the new posts will either rank low or not at all.
4) Infrequent Blogging
Failure to publish new posts regularly will result in the stagnation of your blog. When visitors see that you haven’t published a new post in several weeks or longer, they may assume your blog has been abandoned, in which case they probably won’t return.
To encourage visitors to come back, you must frequently publish new posts. This, however, should not be exchanged for quality.
Depending on the size of your blog, as well as its niche, one to three posts per week should suffice. I write more when I’m launching a new blog.
5) Using Dull Headlines for Posts
When creating posts for your blog, don’t use dull headlines. You should give each post compelling, though relevant, headlines that entice visitors to read it.
If a post has a dull headline, visitors won’t feel compelled to read it. In turn, the post will suffer from poor user engagement metrics, including a high bounce rate and a low average time on page.
To prevent poor user engagement metrics from harming your blog’s performance, you must create compelling headlines.
Headline Optimizers
- Portent.com Title Maker
- Jarvis Headline Creator
- Thrive Themes Headline Optimizer
6) Creating All-Text Posts
Regardless of the topic, you should embed at least one relevant image into each post published on your blog. Posts with visualized content outperform text-only posts in nearly every way.
With an image, posts can attract traffic from both the standard search results as well as Google Images and Bing Images. Images also make posts more readable by breaking up their text.
If you create all-text posts, on the other hand, your blog will likely suffer from low traffic and poor readability.
7) Overlooking SEO
Don’t make the mistake of overlooking search engine optimization (SEO) for your blog. Even if you intend to generate traffic through other channels, such as social media or paid advertising, you should still optimize your blog for search engines.
SEO, of course, is a multi-pronged process that involves optimizing on-page elements, such as title tags, image alt tags, and meta descriptions, as well as building backlinks.
By conducting SEO on your blog, it will rank higher on Google and Bing and, subsequently, generate more organic traffic.
8) Disabling Comments
Assuming your blog supports them, you should enable comments.
Visitor comments help to keep your posts fresh by updating them with new content. A typical comment may only consist of 30 to 50 words, but when a post receives hundreds of comments from visitors, those extra words quickly add up.
If you disable comments on your blog, you’ll forfeit this new content.
9) Monetizing With Third-Party Ads
What’s wrong with using third-party ads to monetize your blog? The ad below is a Google Adsense Ad for example:
Third-party ads, including AdSense and Ezoic ads, send visitors to other websites. You may earn money from impressions and clicks by displaying third-party ads on your business’s blog, but it could cost your business more money in the form of lost sales.
If a visitor clicks a third-party ad, he or she may land on a competitor’s website. Once there, the visitor may purchase the competitor’s product or service rather than your business product or service.
Rather than third-party ads, monetize your blog with ads for your business products or services.
That being said, if you are creating your blog to specifically monetize with ads and affiliate links, that’s another story altogether!
10) Not Promoting Posts
Your work isn’t over just because you hit the “publish” button for a new post. To increase its performance, you should promote it with your favorite social media tool.
If you have social media accounts set up for your website — don’t use your personal accounts — you can use them to promote recently published posts. Just log into your social media accounts, at which point you can copy and paste a post’s URL to share it with your followers.
Blogging is a low-cost digital marketing tactic that leverages the power of high-quality content to attract visitors.
For a successful business blogging strategy, though, you must avoid these mistakes. From using a different domain than your business website to focusing on sales-driven posts and more, these mistakes can leave your business blog dead in the digital water.
