Are You a Victim to Common Blogging Mistakes?

Have you been nursing the silent ambition of donning the hat of a successful blogger?  Whoa. To position yourself in the blogging space, it’s important to know the golden tips to blogging. Think you’re done? Oh boy!  Knowing the tricks to ward off the danger of falling victim to most common blogging bloopers is even more important.

I wore the blogging jacket a few years ago. Today after half a decade, I make a shameless confession that I committed some big blogging mistakes. Fortunately, some real accomplished gentlemen, rather some paragons of generosity, flocked to my rescue and handed over those much needed blogging band-aids to me on time. Again, a big ‘Thank you’ to Mr. Pawan Aggarwal, my mentor in Online Blogging!

Don’t be guilty, if you are prone to blogging mistakes. There’s a whole blogging first-aid kit available, full of easy fixes. Here are a few tips. Follow them. Go, cross swords with millions of bloggers out there and rule the roost.

So, you’re your company’s blogger. All eyes are riveted on you that you’ll swirl your magic blogging wand. More website traffic, more leads in-flow, more conversions down the sales funnel. Whoops. Nothing happening? Are you doing one of these?

Are you publishing the blog on a free domain, different from your company’s main website? Eeek…Serious damning move! It hurts your search engine optimization and branding efforts. Search engines are hungry for fresh content. Every blog that your write creates a fresh web page for search spiders to crawl and index, and make get you the most coveted space on search engine results. So if you run a blog on a separate domain, then you’re actually depriving your corporate website of the SEO juice that you squeeze from your blog.

Quick fix: Bring your blog home. Integrate it with your corporate website, either on a subdomain or in the website’s folder. And, feed your website with the fresh SEO juice of your blog.

Are you lost in the humdrums of other inbound marketing initiatives and publishing your blogs infrequently? Trust me on this one – Frequency does matter! If you’re inconsistent in your blogging spree, you’re not moving a needle.

Easy Fix: Online blogging demands boatloads of resources, time and commitment. Deep research throws light on the fact that businesses that blog frequently benefit most in terms of generating leads. So here’s one trick pony to help you generate more traffic and leads – Upkeep your blog with utmost dedication. Publish frequently and consistently. Churn out as much fresh content as possible through your blogs. Charm your target audience with thought-provoking and unique blogs. More traffic, more leads, more sales!

Boy, you can’t afford to miss out on the next one!

Blogging Mistakes: Are you a victim or victor?

Are you blowing the trumpet about your product all the time? A big turn off for your readers! Company bloggers get deterred by criticism too often (even I used to be). Deadly targets, time running out, performance appraisals nearing. And next, you start vomiting out too much product-centric content on your blog in an attempt to spread maximum possible awareness about your brand in the market and resultant heavy web traffic and leads. Seriously, no thought leadership.

Quick fix:Remember, your target audience is hungry for relevant and remarkable content. If there exists a yawning gap between the desired content and fed content, then you will fail to accomplish your avowed blogging goals. Modify your editorial calendar and slate varied content topics to be published on the chosen days. Your readers wish to see you as a thought leader and  you keep feeding them with only your product-focused content. Abandon the blinkered approach of bragging about your product. This is a recipe to disaster. There should be no rumbles of discontentment for content in your readers. Seduce them with though-provoking content and drive them crazy until they feel hungry for your content.Write about your relevant industry’s best practices, trends, statistics, general topics of interest to your readers. Focus on educational content, non-product focused case studies. And lots more!

Are you only writing and not promoting your blog? Shhhhhhhhh..approach. You publish but don’t promote your content. By doing this, you’re actually deflating your readership and subscriber base. Social networks are the real home of your content.  If you do not curate or publish your content on social media sites, you are not letting your content shake hands with the other family members i.e., millions of registered users there. If they do not come to know about the existence of your content on the web, you’re robbing your blog of its potential.

Easy fix:Create your presence on major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. Build your community there. Expand your reach. Finally, share your blog with them and make this social media sharing exercise an easy one. Convert your fans into powerful evangelists of your brand on these sites.

Are you overlooking your blog metrics? Don’t care to see if your blogging effort is paying you at all? Well, you’re ignoring some real valuable insights then. How are you going to convince your conniving BOSS about your blogging success? Apart from playing a key role in determining the next hike in the salary of a company blogger, blog analytics do matter when it comes to analyzing the topics that work and filtering them from the ones that don’t. More so, these insights help you to chalk out an effective blog content road map for the next quarter.

Quick fix: Keep a close watch on the performance of your blog. Monitor and measure the success of your blogging effort across different parameters. Key insights such as number of subscribers and comments, popular keywords, page views, social media shares, number of trackbacks and inbound links, number of leads tickling down the sales funnel and finally conversions – all these metrics do create waves.

Overfed with blogging mistakes and fixes? Well, it’s time for this blabbering tongue to stop. Hope these tips would help you sharpen your blogging razor and scale your effort to new heights of effectiveness.

Happy Blogging!!!