Fewer companies are creating and maintaining blogs, according to recent reports. As a content marketer, I don’t necessarily consider this a bad thing. Creating and maintaining a great business blog is a significant investment, and it’s not right for every company. If you’re not attracting the audience you want, the business case just isn’t there to do all that work.
In some cases, the culture of the company is the problem. (See my previous post on “Is your small business really ready to blog?” for a list of signs that your company isn’t blog-compatible.) Those kinds of issues aren’t easily fixed in time to save a blog.
At the same time, I see a lot of business blogs struggling due to easily fixable mistakes. Here are three of the most common business blogging mistakes I see, and some advice on how to correct them.
- You’re constantly stressed about what to write — and then you don’t write anything at all. I’m sure some people do just wake up every day bursting with ideas about what to blog about, which they just effortlessly sit down at the computer and bang out. For the rest of us, it’s pretty easy to spend more energy worrying about how we’re not writing than it would take to just do the work. The Fix: A calendar, coupled with blocked out times on your schedule to do nothing but write. As you think of ideas throughout the week, jot them down somewhere. When it’s writing time, you should have a nice list to work from.
- It reads like sales copy — even though it’s not. One of the tipoffs to readers that that they are reading sales/PR copy, and not informational or news content, is the inappropriate use of capitalization. There’s a brand of English business writing that is apparently derived from German, as it is absolutely littered with capitalized words. But the words aren’t random — they are words that the marketing person thinks are really important. Like Sales and Marketing. When you write in this style, your readers subconsciously discount your otherwise awesome informational copy as advertising. The Fix: Pick up a copy of the AP Style Guide, and follow its usage guidelines.
- You’re not systematically promoting it. It’s not enough to just create content andshare it once on your FB page. If you really want to build an audience, you need steady engagement. The Fix: Adopt professional tools for managing social media, such as HootSuite Pro, which will allow you to schedule tweets and post to appear throughout the day. Another tool I like: TweetSpinner, which helps you remove spammers and find appropriate new people to follow.
What are some of the most common fixable problems you see in business blogs? How would you correct them?
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5 Ways to Attract More Traffic to Your Business Blog, Now
6:22 pm on May 3, 2012
Hi Mary,
Very interesting incite. I agree most with your second point – people need to make sure their writing passes basic style, grammar and spelling checks if they want their business blog to succeed. I mean, is that too much to ask? It seems as we continue to become more and more reliant on technology, and strive to push out mass amounts of content to get quick results, we tend to hide behind it in a way, and fail to realize that something as simple as a misspelling (or an unnecessary capitalization) can be the difference between an engaged reader, and a one-time visitor.
As you mentioned in the early parts of the article, this might be a way of the blogosphere simply weeding out the pure sales pitches from the stuff that truly matters.
7:22 pm on May 4, 2012
Tarun, are you serious? A comment stressing the importance of spelling that opens with “Very interesting incite,” rather than “Very interesting insight”?
5:30 pm on May 4, 2012
Mary,
Nice post … Where can one get the “AP Style Guide?”
Thanks
4:02 am on May 5, 2012
You can purchase an AP style guide in most good book stores and certainly in any college book store. They are also easily founod on half.com. If you feel that you must spend your faster, The Associated Pree (AP) also sells it on its own website: http://www.apstylebook.com/
For those who just want the basics, check out http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/735/02/
Enjoy!
5:00 am on May 5, 2012
@sanjiv Here you go http://www.apstylebook.com
12:08 am on May 15, 2012
Hi Mary, I found this simple but useful guide:
Brandeis University Web Style Guide – Associated Press Style http://writingcenter.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/apstyle.pdf
I hope this is as usefeul for you as it was to me.
Paz y Baile !
\m/
4:12 pm on August 17, 2012
You can subscribe to the AP Style Guide online for something like $20/year. Then you always have access to the latest updates.
6:32 pm on May 4, 2012
you have incited me to reply!
dont rely on spell check – homonyms will pass muster, even when wrong – remember to learn your basic English before you write -
hope this insight is useful!
klh
5:06 am on May 5, 2012
I think that #1 (constantly producing quality content) is probably the largest obstacle for most publishers. The calander idea is a good call.
Thanks for sharing.
3 Easily Fixable Business Blogging Mistakes Reputation Capital: Content Marketing Strategy, Copywriting, Social Media Consulting | Attraction Marketing
1:50 am on May 6, 2012
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12:26 pm on July 13, 2012
One common problem I see with business blogs is endless burbling about how great the company is but no mention of what it can do for the reader.
People go to company blogs to find out if it’s worth spending time and money on you, so help them decide that it is.
Pick a feature of your product or service and really explain what it does and how that benefits the user. Does it save time? Or eliminate a boring chore?
Find some happy customers and turn them into a case study.
You get the idea. It’s your blog, but don’t use it to talk about yourself.
1:11 pm on July 13, 2012
I love the suggestion of following the AP style guide. If you’re strapped for ideas, we’ve got a free 37-minute exercise, developed by the late best-selling author Keith Miller, that will help you churn out enough weekly topics to last a year.