Yesterday I talked about three ways to make blogging work for your business, so hopefully you understand by this point that blogging is a great way to market your company if you are a small business. Today I am going to talk about the top five mistakes you want to avoid when blogging.
1. Hard Selling
Nobody likes to be sold to. If you come across a blog for a local company, chances are you will be impressed if they are blogging consistently. After all that shows that they are why small businesses need to blogcommitted to their business and are committed to getting information out for their potential customers.
So imagine reading the blog and being sold to throughout the blog. You decide to check another post, and same thing there. Is that the experience you want to give you traffic? Heck no. You want to provide quality content that they feel is interesting and engaging. Soft selling only.
2. No Multi-media
Nothing is more boring than white and black space on a webpage. Add in some interesting and intriguing graphics. Add pictures or video from your work as appropriate. If you need stock photos, you can get free stock photos at Stock.xchang or you can pay for stock photos at someplace like Shutterstock. You can have infographics made which are great at displaying information and images combined. Format it so it is easy on the eyes, use a professional font, and a few pictures.
3. Poor Grammar
I understand not everyone is good at spelling or punctuation. Everyone is at a different level when it comes to the English language. That being said, grammatical errors on your website not only makes it hard to read, but it makes your business appear unprofessional. Spellcheck and go back and edit your posts as necessary.
If you are really bad at it, you may want to have somebody else proofread it for you before you post it. We can all forgive a few errors here and there. But obvious errors throughout need to be addressed.
4. Boring Posts
I’m not saying that you have to be a regular Jerry Seinfeld in your posts. I wouldn’t recommend having strictly dry, instructional posts with no pizazz, no flavor. Your blog post should be written in a way that a total novice can come and read your post and want to learn more about your business.
5. Jumping All Over The Place
What I mean by this is blogging about anything and everything. Say you own an HVAC company. Visitors to your site don’t want to hear your thoughts on the current political situation, (that’ll likely alienate some
people) or what you ate for dinner last night.
They want content that is relevant to your industry. Don’t forget, you are the expert, many things that seem obvious to you are not well known to the general public. Sure, throw in some personal stories so your visitors can relate to you, but focus on your industry. Think of what your clients would want to hear about.
Keep these five rules and as you are blogging you’ll have much more success. Did I mention that blogging helps with SEO for small businesses? Yep, sure does. So sprinkle one or two of your keywords in there. The more relevant content you have out there the, the more pages that the search engines can index and that you can potentially rank for. Comment in the box below and let me know what you’d like to hear about next!