3 Common Mistakes Business Bloggers Make

If you have started a business blog, you have already made a step in the right direction. Business blogging goes a long way to building credibility, influence, attracting ideal customers and clients and selling your products, programs and events. However, you need to make sure you have set up your business blog for success. You can quite easily sabotage your brand building efforts with simple, avoidable mistakes. Look at the mistakes below and do an audit on your own business blog to see if you are making them. If so, fix them right away.

Photo credit: http://kdmedianow.com

1) No Sharing Links – Seriously? I cringe when I visit blogs that make this mistake. Especially if I actually like the blog, find the blog post(s) helpful and cannot share it easily. 9 times out of 10, I leave the blog without sharing the post. But believe it or not, every once in a while, I spend a few minutes to open up a new browser window, navigate to Twitter, Facebook or Stumbleupon, copy and paste the link, copy and paste the title then share accordingly. That is a lot of steps to go through to share someone’s well-written blog post article. I am sure that I am one of the few people that do this.

I will share someone’s blog post if I really want to make a connection with them and find their content helpful to my niche.

But they will have to score really high on those points for me to take the time.

So here are a few links to WordPress Share plugins to make your blog posts easily shareable by your readers:

Share and Follow
Sexy Bookmarks
Addthis

2) No links or Icons to their Social Media Profiles – Your business blog should be the hub for your brand. While your social media profiles may already be pointing to your blog, your blog should also link to those profiles. People may not spend too much time on your blog to find out about you. They may want to get to know you in a ‘social setting’ so to speak. So they may look for your twitter profile link, facebook or YouTube to see you in a different light. This is how the “Know, Like and Trust” process often starts. Make it easier for this relationship with your niche market to begin. Place your social media profile links, preferably within attractive icons on your business blog.

3) No Subscription Option – There is no way for persons to subscribe to your blog for email or RSS Updates. Even worse, there is no subscription form, with an opt-in offer to build a list. If you have a business blog and you are not building a list, you are leaving money on the table. You need to build a list of prospects that you can market to and communicate with via email newsletters on a regular basis, sell your products, promote your events or other related resources. I talk about building an email list here on my blog quite a bit. Check out these posts for more information:

What to do when you need to grow your email list, here’s 14 ideas
10 List Building Hotspots on Your Blog
How to Add Email Marketing to Your Blog

I hope these tips help. Could you take a moment and share with me any other mistakes you think business bloggers should avoid. Just go ahead and leave a comment in the box below.

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