The Top 7 Flaws of Business Blogs

1. No person.

A business blog is a PERSONAL blog of a company CEO or founder or other high-ranking executive. Do not let the committee to decide what you must write there and do not hire writers to write posts instead of you.

Be personal, include your real photo, bio, let your business blog be the extension of your personality.

2. Too much person.

Another extreme of personality – too much of your person – is as bad as the first one. Remember, this is your BUSINESS blog, not personal diary and all stories about your family, kids, pets, hobbies, political issues are needless except when they are the part of your story about business.

Finding the right balance between anonymity and irrelevance to your business personality is art, but you must master it.

3. Business blog does not fit to the marketing strategy.

Your business blog should spread ideas that express your worldview, your companys difference from competitors, your uniqueness. All marketing strategy should be built around this uniqueness, so your business blog must confirm this one more time.

When you write a post for your business blog, think not about short-term result, but long-term impact on your business. Your marketing strategy is about long-term success, right? So, your business blog is about long-term impact to your readers.

4. Hard selling in your business blog.

Business blog is about information, relationship with audience, knowledge but not about the hard sell of your products. For hard sell you have your company’s site, please leave the business blog for the expression of your worldview.

It’s OK to have some banners and links in your blog pointing to your commercial pages where hard sell occurs, but please, do not even think about writing a post consisting of hard sell of your products.

A better idea is to sell your worldview, your thinking, your values and find prospects who think like you. But pushing hard just throws away your readers and you will not benefit from that.

Your business blog is your idea spreading channel, not the sales channel. Don’t try to sell, share knowledge, promote your wordview instead. Blogging is about sharing, not selling.

5. Censorship of readers comments.

Sure, you should moderate comments and prevent your blog from spam, rudity, personal assaults to you or commentators but you must leave negative comments.

Negative comments are part of your business blog and they are not necessary the bad thing. One reader of my Lithuanian blog once said to me “when I was reading these negative comments I was convinced of your rightness”.

If negativeness is about your product quality, maybe your readers are right and you must pay more attention to your products? To service staff?

Just answer correctly and take action, negative comments can be as valuable as positive. Do not change comments, change your standpoint to them!

6. Posting in the sake of posting.

This flaw arises because of so popular believe that “you must post frequently”. No, you don’t. Don’t write a post because you feel that you must post something on your blog. Write only when you have something useful to your readers, to your brand.

7. Hiring an advertising agency to launch and manage your business blog.

Sorry, but usual advertising agencies don’t understand web 2.0 world. One-way communication is so ingrained in their thinking. Two-way conversation in web 2.0 age makes them so insecure. When it comes to internet, advertising agencies still live in 1.0 world and focuses on esthetics, flash, animation, programming features and pay so little attention to the main feature of web 2.0 – conversation, the two-way communication. Accustomed to advertising world, they still live in advertising age, not web 2.0 age. Sorry, but the old rules don’t work in here.