Business Blogging: 5 Tips to Avoid Failure

Why do you need a Business Blog in the first place. My previous post dealt with this question – the proof is in the vast number of blogs that are out there.

Technorati currently track over 100 million blogs across the blogosphere. Interestingly they say that 55% are active, meaning they have had at least one new post over the past three months.

Therefore around 50 million or 45% of blogs are likely to fail. This post discusses why that is so and more importantly suggests ways to avoid failure.

Many business blog efforts run out of gas after a fast enthusiastic start period. If you understand the reasons for failure of a business blog, you can plan to avoid it.

Nevertheless, there are many advantages in having a business blog.

I believe that these are 5 of the top reasons why business blogs are failing.

Unclear Objectives.

There can be many good reasons to start a business blog. These can range from, Branding, PR, educating potential customers, communicating the company’s expertise, or positioning the CEO as a thought leader.

Whatever these goals are they need to be defined, written down and agreed by senior management within the business.

Poor Quality Content

If quantity wins over quality you will have a clear recipe for failure since reader credibility depends on producing consistently high quality content.

Based on the defined objectives, a content framework and an editorial calendar should be prepared. One idea is to think of an ebook on your niche as the end product. Then build a table of contents and identify specific category and chapter of topics and sub-topics to be covered.

Failure To Publish Regularly

This along with poor quality content is probably the single reason for failure.

This can be avoided through using the editorial calendar as a checklist for completing each topic and chapter in the ebook.

Frequency is less important than predictability. Frequency may range from daily to 2 per month. In my opinion around 1 post per week should be the minimum frequency to reduce the risk of failure for a business blog.

Unrealistic expectations

If failure is to be avoided the business must recognise that Blogging is hard work and not a spare time activity. Not everyone is a natural blog writer and community builder.

For most small businesses, the owner or a senior manager may take responsibility. There is a real risk of failure should the nominated person not have time to write quality material and achieve consistent publishing target dates. One solution to this might be to hire a freelance writer.  Elance is a good recruitment source – they list over 24,000 writers. If you use Elance be sure to get testimonials and sample material plus talk to a few previous customers about key performance metrics such as quality and meeting deadlines.

In larger companies, beware if the CEO volunteers to be  a lead author unless you have a writer to produce material that he can edit and approve. The CEO can be the figurehead and material can be produced by a ghost writer or PR executive.

Again planning and budgeting are key to success. A content plan should be accompanied by a resource plan and a budget. If you do not allocate a budget to the blog it will almost certainly fail. It needs be included in the marketing budget as a specific marketing activity.

No Feedback Mechanisms.

Many business blogs do not provide for comments – this is a recipe for disaster. Are they afraid of what readers may say? or are they simply not prepared to allocate a resource for response handling?

Comments are the life blood of blogs and they turn the blog from a traditional one way communication channel; to a mechanism for two way dialogue taking feedback on board – both positive and negative. Negative feedback may be a valuable alert or early warning system

Lack Of Regular Readers

This will happen if the blog is not promoted. This can be done in loads of ways, online and offline. You should check out Jacob Morgan’s thoughts on 11 ways you can drive traffic to your blog,

The key to maintaining a base of regular readers this is by writing material that is compelling and makes readers engage in a conversation with you and other fellow readers of the site.

Please leave you comments – we look forward to hearing your views.

If you like this topic you can subscribe to the blog

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.