Business blogging is undisputed as a terrific way to build your corporate brand, your employer brand and personal brand on-line, increase your website traffic and get found in the search engines when people are searching for the products and services that you offer.
However what are some of key mistakes you need to avoid if you want to build a credible business blog? I’m not talking about the mistakes usually referred to such as not posting regularly to your business blog or not engaging in the blogosphere by commenting and linking to other peoples business blogs.
Here are three mistakes I see business bloggers make:
1. Not branding your business blog – by branding I recommend you look at the following three areas
(a) Ensuring that the name of your business blog connects to your business and the services you offer
(b) Making sure that the design of your business blog follows through from your corporate identity. There are many low cost and no cost blogging tools available which one of the reasons why business blogging has become so popular. That is fantastic – but please do not scrimp on investing in the design of your business blog to reflect your corporate identity and also making it easy to navigate for the readers of your business blog.
(c) Creating content that meets the needs of your target market and niche – consider your blog as a way to represent your unique expertise in your field.
2. Not connecting your business blog to your corporate website – if you have a corporate website make sure that you have a link from your website to your business blog. I do recommend that this link is not just a hyperlink to your blog which is authored on a separate platform. To ensure that you benefit from traffic to your business blog, I recommend that you use a blogging platform such as WordPress.org where you can host your business blog alongside your website.
3. Not adding an about page – you might not realise it but your about page on your business blog or website is the second most likely page that people will click through to. It is important to have details about you and the team authoring your business blog as people want to check out who you are – they are genuinely interested in the authors of your business blog and they are also interested in assessing your professional credibility in the areas you are writing about.
Why not assess your business blog against these common business blogging mistakes and then establish a plan to enhance your business blog so that truly does build your brand?
I’ve been writing my blog for several years. I have spent countless hours on writing it – thinking content was king. Now I best go to work on the about us.
Thanks
That one gets me. I’ve seen my fair share of business blogs on Blogger. Some can pull it off, some can’t – it depends whether you are percieved as looking to get a hip image by getting a blogger blog, or whether you look like you can’t afford it. I have to say that blogger does offer the ability to use your own domain though. So for instance, instead of having:
yourname.blogspot.com,
You can make your blog redirect to blog.yourname.com. It might be worth checking out for those people who don’t want to pay to maintain a dynamic website with MySQL and Apache.
Ultimately though, I’d opt for WordPress on my own hosting any day.
Robert – I completly agree.
I had never considered that some people may consider a Blogger blog as being hip.
I always considered it was a place that people started if they did not want to invest in Typepad.com which I much prefer as a blogging platfom for novices who are not ready to take the plunge with WordPress.
Thanks Krishna De! You have made a useful conclusion
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Krishna,
Thanks for making the comment about the “About” page. I’m always amazed by the bloggers who don’t add their photos and some background information about themselves to their blogs — credibility is so important in blogging. If I don’t see an “About” section, I’m not as apt to trust the information.
Good post.
Marcia Hoeck
Marcia – you are welcome. With the proliferation of splogs where people are farming others articles from blogs and newsletters as has been happening to me recently – often with no copyright clause or attribution – I think that the about page will become more and more important as a point of validation of who is behind the blog.
I do agree about an about us page. However, the biggest mistake I see with corporate blogs is simply a lack of postings after the first few weeks. Blogs that aren’t fresh are a huge turn off.
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