Building a blog as a business is certainly not easy. If you have heard from the so-called experts that blogging for business is easy, you have heard it wrong. Establishing a blog is easy; growing it to a point that it serves your objectives is a different story.
From my experience, growing a business blog is trivial because you must balance between user experience and the business side of the blog. You also need to maintain quality in such a way that your business blog can stay upfront as one of the authority ones.
Despite being challenging, a business blog can offer you plenty of benefits, both tangible (including monetary benefits) and intangible (including branding benefits). But to enjoy them, you have to work hard (don’t believe those telling you the otherwise!) – especially in ensuring that your business blog is on good terms with its readers and search engines.
Running your business blog, you need to be sure you don’t do these mistakes…
1. Don’t have a proper blog posting schedule
Posting 10 blog posts last week and 1 blog post this week is bad for your blog business; you need to properly plan your blog posting frequency – and stick to your plan. Infrequent posting confuses your readers and you will lose returning visitors as they expect to see your business blogs updated on regular basis.
With that being said, you don’t have to post every day. Publishing 2 or 3 blog posts a week – and do so consistently – is enough to bring visitors – and search engine bots – to visit you on regular basis.
2. Giving up too early
I have seen too many great business blogs that are lifeless. The last blog post was published months even years ago. What’s so sad is the fact that their old blog posts are great read! They are traffic magnets – if pitched correctly to the right audience… and if the owners are willing to be patient and not giving up too early. Today, their blogs are “undeads” or “zombies”… they are pretty much alive, but are considered pretty dead as a business.
You know what, if I gave up back in 2009, you wouldn’t see Noobpreneur.com today; you see, blogging is easy; but producing quality blog posts on regular basis – with nearly zero return on your investment in early years often causes bloggers to lose hope. Then they start working on things half-heartedly. Then their blogs die slowly.
If you are serious about establishing your blog as a business, you need to do things right and do the right thing on regular basis – for better or worse; you need to be resilient and stubborn (the right dose of stubbornness is good!) if you want to see results.
3. Putting in too many ads, selling too much stuff
If you run your blog as a business, in order to generate revenues you need to put ads, offer services or sell products (your own or affiliates’)… without those your blog will lose its greater purpose as a business (except you get funding that allows you to focus on content creation and blog promotion!) However, promoting and selling to many things will repel readers – and search engines, too.
It’s better for you to go extra creative for your offline blog promotion: Prints your business cards online (or flyers or brochures) and send them to the guy you hire in Fiverr to hand them over to a number of people on your targeted busy street, and many other ways – the sky is the limit!
Remember, be sure to continuously find a good balance between your content and ads.
4. Taking the wrong SEO advices from the wrong SEO specialists
Noobpreneur.com has to clean up the mess because I trust too much on the so-called SEO experts. Following their advices, I target the main keywords related to Noobpreneur.com and we (I and my SEO service providers) do it too much. I then face the consequences of Google’s changes in algorithm, stopping those trying too hard to rank high in search engine result pages.
Be sure you partner with the right SEO specialists and follow the right SEO advices – because with SEO, fixing things are much, much more resource-intensive than starting things up.
5. Procrastination
As a blog, your number one product is your blog posts. If you procrastinate, your product quality will suffer. And if your blog posts are dropping in quality, the impacts are often unseen with naked eyes… if you procrastinate now, the impact might be felt 2-3 months from now.
Procrastination is a silent killer – when your business blog has gained enough traction in the blogosphere and has gained expert status, it will receive organic traffic; people will flock to your blog because it offers quality. So, business bloggers (including me) tend to slow down and post low quality blog posts – and the blog is still growing well, thanks to the acceleration you did in the past.
However, you will start seeing bad things months later – and you will start seeing it immediately especially after search engines update their algorithms to combat web spams (low quality content – ad more.)
6. Publishing too many guest posts
Too many third-party posts can kill your blog. I know because I’ve been there. And I need to pay dearly to get things right.
Don’t get me wrong – guest posts are great! In fact, some of Noobpreneur.com’s top blog posts are guest posts. However, approving too many mean you are compromising on quality; it’s only natural that the better visible your blog on search engines, the more offers coming your way. Unfortunately, not all of them are quality ones.
Be sure to limit your non-partner post publishing, and be sure to publish those offering quality advices and/or intriguing insights useful for your business blog readers.
7. Approving too many questionable blog post comments
Yes, not all blog comments are worth approving. “I love your blog!” “Thanks you for your blog post” “Cool!” are the type of comments you might want to remove from your blog and not approve in the future. And of course, fake comments that are often unreadable are software-generated and you should remove them at all costs!
They don’t add value and quite often, they are there because the commenters want their links displayed in your blog post pages. What’s more, posting such comments is not relevant with your blog posts’ topics, thus diluting their overall theme – something that can hurt your business blog’s reputation on search engines.
8. Focusing too much on improving your blog
Bloggers want our business blogs to be better. But some of us just too obsessed with our blogs, that we keep on tinkering our blog a bit too much, and stop doing what’s needed in bringing in readers: Getting the words out.
Here’s my advice for you: For each blog post you publish, you need to promote it well. Just build it and they will come won’t work with business blogging. Improving your blog is great, but you need to bring in more readers so that the improvement you do can benefit more people.
9. Not using social media properly
Related to mistake number 8 above, it’s often for us business bloggers to neglect our social media presence. I made such a mistake and now I realise that I need social media more than ever – especially knowing that the indications are there: Social media signals are touted to replace links in getting your website ranked in search engines. Bing has started to emphasis this, and Google’s too with its social signals (+1’s.) Don’t miss out.
Moreover, working on your social media presence can give you another type of blog traffic. Relying too much on search engines (especially Google) in driving traffic to your blog is disastrous (just ask me!)
10. Not listening to other expert bloggers
As a business blogger, you need to continuously learn; you need to listen to authority bloggers and follow their advices. If they say that you need to develop product/service to supplement your blog content, then you need to do so. If they say that doing X will give you Y because they have done so, you need to listen to them.
Of course, you shouldn’t follow blindly – you always need second opinions; so, with that being said, you need to read blog posts and articles to get the ideas of what’s working and what’s not. Again, you need to learn continuously.
Takeaway
So, there you go – 10 mistakes many business bloggers do that often destroying their hard work for years. Of course, there are so many other mistakes you need to avoid. Just like any other type of business, your job as a business blog owner is to keep yourself updated on how to build your blog better.
The Internet and blogosphere are changing continuously. What’s work in the past might no longer work today; so the best thing you can do is to tap on the pulse of the market and deliver what the market wants (and do so better than your competitors!)
Good luck in growing your business blog!
Ivan Widjaya
Business blog owner