These Mistakes On Your Corporate Blog Don’t Make:

You know you have to setup a blog for your business, but you don’t want to waste time and money by managing it the wrong way. A bad corporate blog is worse than not having one at all. Avoid these common mistakes on your corporate blog.
1. Using the wrong platform for blogging.
Not every platform is meant for blogging. Your website may have an excellent content management system, but it doesn’t necessarily have the SEO-friendliness, usability, and flexibility that you need in a blog. Only use a platform that has blog features. If absolutely necessary, setup a separate blog that you link to from your website.

2. Publishing heavily promotional posts.
Your corporate blog isn’t the right place to heavily promote your products. This can be done on the rest of your website. However, you can create highly targeted content for your blog that can later be used for pay per click and media buying promotions. If you need help with setting up a PPC campaign, be sure to check out TopTenReviews.com for a list of the top SEO services and software available.
Your blog is what you’re using to attract customers and get them to engage with your content. The blog content should be evergreen and it should provide the reader with value. This is the best way to increase your organic reach.

 3. Publishing posts that aren’t meaningful for your marketing strategy.
You don’t want your posts to be full of sales speak, but they still have to be in line with your marketing strategy. Each blog post should take into consideration the profile of both your target audience and your regular readers. The more you can relate with your audience and the easier you can make it for them to read and share your content, the better experience they will have.
A good example of this would be our “How to Blog in 2014” post, which walks the user through everything they would need to setup if they wanted to launch a successful blog of their own. Make sure your content is unique, easy to follow and provides value.

4. Not using social media for promotion.
Publishing on your blog is great, but it’s not enough. You also need to promote your content through social media channels. Publish the post’s link on your social media pages, take interesting snippets from the post and share them with your social media audience, and use promoted posts to get more people to see them.
In addition to sharing your blog content through social media, you can also rank multiple times in the search results through social updates as well. For example, here’s what people might see when they search for “Zac Johnson” through Google — notice all the social updates and profiles with the red arrows.

5. Targeting the wrong SEO.
The main reason you’re blogging is probably to increase your SEO, right? To do that correctly, you need to do the right keyword research. Not only do you have to use SEO that’s aligned with your industry, but also that’s in line with your marketing objectives. Lastly, the SEO you choose should be easy to target.
There are many keywords that you can go after. Stay away from the generic key phrases and stick with long tail keywords that your blog is heavily targeted too. Not only will this provide the best content for your audience, it will also make it much easier for your site to rank as well.

6. Giving up quickly.
Blogging takes time. You won’t see benefits within the first few months. It takes a long time to build an audience and establish a presence. By always posting on the same day and at the same time each week, you’ll develop a following because they can depend on fresh content on a regular schedule. Keep at it and eventually you’ll notice that traffic grows and stays high.

If you want to learn more about how some of the top bloggers in our space are scheduling out their content and using consistency to keep their audience coming back, be sure to check out this post on the Sales Lion. A few of the names mentioned on the list include Gini Dietrich, Shonali Burke, Danny Brown and Marcus Sheridan.
7. Not having any conversion goals.
Getting traffic is only the first step. You need to convert readers, too. Figure out what you want them to do, like sign up for your newsletter or visit your main website. Track your blog’s metrics to make sure people are taking the right actions. If it doesn’t seem to be working, tweak your strategy.
When in doubt, hire a professional. You don’t need to be well-versed in the world of blogging. If possible, have a dedicated team or contractor who can get your blog up to par.

No matter what type of business or brand you already have, creating a blog is simply one of the best decisions you can make. Before launching your blog, be sure to run through the list we have above and make sure you have all of your data points covered. It’s easy to start a blog, but it’s a lot of work to create one that stands out from the crowd and provides real value.

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