Yesterday I had a great conversation with self-described LEED geek Chris Moline, of Commercial Carpets of America. Chris is a former journalist, and has an information-packed blog about green flooring and carpeting.
Chris asked me what I saw as the most critical mistakes that business bloggers make.
Apart from the obvious one (which I model perfectly) of not posting frequently enough, there are two issues that I see all the time when I review a blog from the perspective of strategy and return on investment:
- Lack of clear branding and identity statements for the new visitor. If your blog is well indexed, a lot of people are going to find you via search engines. They’re coming to you with no context, and absolutely no idea of who you are or what products and / or services you offer. So you need to include some positioning at the top of your template so that they can easily find out more about you and your business.
- Lack of leverage and compelling calls to action. If this is a business blog, then presumably you’re writing it to attract new and returning customers. If you’ve ever heard me speak, you’ve heard my mantra “Every page of your site should have a strategy”. For every single piece of content, you need to decide what outcome you want from visitors – whether it’s to go to your Website to see more details of a product, or to send you an e-mail, or to sign up for your RSS feed. And you need to provide plenty of clickable links within your text to encourage this.
I’ve been reviewing traffic reports for a lot of blogs recently. Most of them exhibit one or more of these mistakes, and you can clearly see the result in the lack of response or good click-through rates. So take another look at your blog postings from your business strategy perspective – do you have a “Leaky Boat” blog?
