6 Blog Mistakes That Can Turn Your Audience Away

These blog mistakes can turn your audience away and cost you business.

Blogging can be a great tool that expands your audience and creates additional business for you. Whether you are in the B2B or B2C industries, it can be an immense help in finding new business for you.

Success with your blog can lead to additional clients, and help fuel your business for time to come. But if you routinely make these blog mistakes, they can dampen your efforts and turn your audience off.

6 Blog Mistakes You Should Stop Making

Lack of value — People read a blog when they have questions, or they are looking to improve. With the internet, there’s no shortage of valuable information online. If you are holding your most valuable content back for pay, or recycling the same trite talking points as everyone else in your industry, it could spell trouble.

The solution is to find new ways to convey value within your industry. Put your stamp of originality on it. It can be counterintuitive at times, but make sure you are putting your best information out there. When it feels like you should be charging for that information, what you’re really doing is establishing yourself as an expert and building trust.

Your writing is like a stiff suit — There is a difference between formal and professional. You can be professional, and be casual as well. Feel free to ditch the corporate speak and the 5-syllable Ivy League words.

A lot of great brands have capitalized on a more casual approach. So don’t set out writing to prove how smart you are. Write so that you can start a conversation with your audience. The solution to this blog problem is to simply write how you would talk with a client in person. (Psssst….You’d be friendly and you’d explain things to them. At least I hope.)

Your blog disregards your business or marketing goals — Have you spent the last three weeks talking about the sale of widget X? Why then, would you be blogging about widget Y? Your blog should reinforce your marketing and sales work. What products, services or issues are the most pressing for your business or industry right now? This is what you should be talking about. Make sure you are working to align your entire marketing strategy.

Lack of storytelling –Don’t just write blog posts because they’re the same you’re your competition is publishing. Don’t just copy bullets verbatim from the largest industry sites on the market.

Data and numbers are good for reinforcing a larger point, but they’re not the main factor in sales. People buy products based on emotion. They’re buying the improved version of themselves. So make sure that you are pulling at emotions and telling a good story as you write.

• How will your product improve their lives?
• How did your business start?
• What is the unique angle that you bring to your business?
• What are some of your interests, and how do they relate?

Keeping all these questions in mind as you publish blog posts will help you tell better stories.

One long, dry block of text — It’s true that people will read longer blog posts about the right subjects. But those posts should be made friendly for the visual learners. No one wants to read huge, long paragraphs. Subheads and lists can also break things up. More than one quality image in a post can help keep your audience engaged.

You’re done when it’s published — Blogging is not a set it and forget it phenomenon. A lot of bloggers want to hit publish and walk away. This is a tough way to attract eyeballs — especially in a crowded market.

Instead, you can focus on improving the SEO for your post. WordPress Plugins like Yoast can help you take the steps needed to optimize your post. Taking the time to publish your post on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Google Plus and Facebook can also help. All these places can help you attract more eyeballs and give your post additional life. It can also help to find other industry sites to aggregate your posts.

Conclusion…

Are you making any of these blog mistakes? Most have some relatively simple fixes that can be implemented to grow your audience and improve your business. Blogging produces excellent results, but it can take consistent effort. Make sure you are doing everything you can to see results.

Matt Brennan is a Chicago-area marketing writer and copy editor. He is also the author of Write Right-Sell Now.