7 Worst Business Blogging Mistakes You Need to Avoid Tweet

Is Your Blog Helping Your ROI?

Your inbound marketing strategy can’t take off without great marketing content, and your business blog shouldn’t be ignored. HubSpot has found that companies that blog generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t. Even if you’re posting once a week, you may not have leveraged the full power of content creation for your small business brand. We’ve compiled a list of 7 of the most common business blogging mistakes we see and some insight on how you can improve:

1. Not Using a Subdomain

Is your company blog housed on your website, or are you using Blogger, WordPress, Typepad or Tumblr? While it’s incredibly easy to get started on these free blogging platforms and it might take a little help from an IT specialist tocreate a subdomain on your website, you can’t afford this blogging mistake. If your blog is hosted elsewhere, your company website won’t receive the SEO boost it deserves with all your hard work on content creation!

2. Not Writing Often

Does your business blog tend to be neglected when things get busy? We recognize that small business owners rarely have much free time, but research has indicated that blogging on a regular basis is necessary in order to see real results. Don’t overload yourself by committing to an aggressive posting strategy. Even if you can only post once or twice weekly, making a commitment and sticking to it is necessary for success.

3. Neglecting to Optimize for Search

Google handles 100 billion search queries each month. That doesn’t even account for searches on Bing or Yahoo! Are you actively working to ensure your content is can be found by people who need your product or service solution? It’s no secret that business blogging is a powerful tool for gaining and maintaining a high search ranking. If you’re not leveraging internal linking, keyword research, tags and other SEO strategies to ensure your content can be found by search users, your inbound marketing strategy could be suffering.

4. Over-Optimizing for Search

Please tell me you’re not still writing for the Google search algorithm of 2010? Keyword stuffing or even just using a high keyword density isn’t an effective business blogging tactic in the world of Panda 3.9, where quality trumps quantity. Google realizes that people want great content, and the main way it determines value is through volume of inbound links. Write information, tutorials and articlesthat people want to link to by including a distinct voice, style, humor and fresh statistics.

5. Not Leveraging Social Media

So you’ve built a blog on a subdomain of your website. You’ve filled out a content calendar and you’re publishing a few times a week. But nobody is reading your writing! If you’re not promoting your content on social media, you could be missing out on quite a few opportunities for visibility. Maybe some of your Twitter followers just don’t know the content exists! Make social media promotion part of your. Better yet, take the advice of Rand Fishkin and other inbound marketing experts and promote your content more than once to give it the best possible chance to really take off.

6. Not Including CTAs

Are you including call-to-action (CTA) buttons at the bottom of your blog content? Are blog readers given a chance to subscribe to your blog in the sidebar? HubSpot recommends that business bloggers include a call-to-action button at the bottom of every piece of blog content. Once you’ve developed some irresistible, free top-of-the-funnel offers like eBooks and white papers and some CTA buttons, continually test out design, colors and placement. Make a point of leveraging your content for profit, and discover how you can best use articles as a lead generation tool.

7. Ignoring Blog Analytics

How are your numbers, anyway? It can seem tempting to push metrics to the back burner, but not analyzing success on a regular basis could seriously hurt your ROI. You should be tracking inbound marketing analytics like traffic, sources of your page views and whether you’re generating inbound links. You shouldn’t try to argue with the data, and your blog metrics are going to give you the best insight into how you can improve your ROI.