5 common mistakes creating a blog for company

Some companies now begin to look to blogs to pour a variety of information and to be closer to their stakeholders. But beware, there are 4 common mistakes made ​​by a company due creating a blog.

1. Starting Without Strategy
Do not start a blog of your company without a clear purpose. For, this purpose will further influence the content of the blog. Do not also underestimate this blog only because the visitors just a little. Because it can be, from a handful of people that just who will become a client or business partner of your company.

"The biggest mistake of most small businesses is when they think of blogging as an easy task," said Marjorie R. Asturias, president of web marketing company Blue Volcano Media.

When thinking about your company's blog strategy should consider, what is the purpose of this blog? Does this blog to support the company's business? What needs to allocate human resources to manage this blog? and others.

2. All Just Thinking About Your Company
This fact, the company would want to show how great their company blog that they have. So from that, it is hoped will become a means of promotion for them to its stakeholders.

But unfortunately, the blog is not the press section. Blogs can indeed be used to share information but different place for sharing news to the media. Then, try to be more sensitive to the needs of your audience. Do not create a company blog that it was just selling, selling, and selling.

Provide information that helps your company blog audience. For example, to provide tips & tricks, information from research institutions, statistical data, and other useful information. Occasionally, there's no harm in also spit out excess product that your company.

3. Failed to Build Links
Links should be an integral component of anything that calls itself a blog. To embrace them to their fullest:
Don’t be afraid to link out: “Many business blogs get so carried away with minimizing PageRank leakage that they end up stifling their blog’s narrative potential,” says Rohin Guha, a community manager at online marketing firm Blue Phoenix Media. “As a company, you want to present the impression that you know what’s happening in the world around you, and unless your daily archives can fill that role, you’ll have to turn to other sources.” Guha suggests setting a minimum number of links for each blog post to get in the habit of linking out.

Cite your sources: Linking to the source of your information is not only ethical, but it’s a good way to build relationships with other blogs and get other blogs to link to you. “Reciprocity is a core strategy to blogging,” Karr says. “When you write about me, I want to pay it back. Don’t think that promoting others (even competitors) is going to push your audience away. There’s plenty of audience to go around. When you’ve identified something remarkable that your audience should know about it, write a post!”

In addition, offers Guha, linking to larger sites gets their attention when they look at referral traffic.
Don’t forget to link to yourself: Digital filing company OfficeDrop hosted a blog on its site for more than a year without linking back to the main page. “Some of our blog entries are the most visited pages on our site, and some of them are very high PageRank sites,” says Head of Marketing Healy Jones. “Now, we take advantage of the SEO power and readership of the blog to have SEO links all over the blog that link back to different pages on our website. Since the blog has a lot of search engine juice (it has a lot of inbound links), we now use it aggressively to transfer rank to the most important pages on our main site.”

4. Not Being Yourself
Being yourself means a couple of things:
Don’t make the intern write the blog: Have someone who can represent the company write about it. An intern impersonating the CEO does not cut it.

Let some “human” show: No one wants to read stiff, corporate jumble. Plus, it’s easier and more engaging to write like a person and not a corporate entity.

A personal tone doesn’t mean that you blog about personal matters: “This isn’t the opportunity to post your favorite ’80s video off of YouTube,” Karr says. “This is the opportunity to wow your audience by being a subject matter expert in your field. Keep your personal stories on your personal blog or on Facebook — where your next prospect won’t be offended by them.”

Blog what you know: What works for everyone else might not work for your company. When Stella Fayman started a blog for FeeFighters.com, she looked at other small businesses’ blogs and saw they were all blogging about social media. Seeing how this topic worked for them, she started blogging about social media even though it was only tangentially related to the company.

“After a while, I realized that in order to establish our brand as a small business finance resource, we needed to blog about what no one else talking about and what was more related to our business: small business operations and finance,” she says. “Our traffic increased significantly after we made this switch.”

5. Ignoring Social Media
Your posts are not going to promote themselves. Get the word out by leveraging your company’s social media accounts.

When you write a new post, discuss it on Twitter and Facebook. Make sure all of your social profiles include a link to your blog. When someone comments on your blog or contacts you about something you wrote through another channel, respond.

“Remember, the biggest benefit of the social web is building relationships, so you must make an effort to engage your readers and respond to them in a timely manner that not only acknowledges them, but makes them feel like valued members of your online community,” says Susan Gunelius, CEO of marketing communications company KeySplash Creative.

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