It’s one thing having a company blog, but quite another to maintain it.
The day-to-day running of your business can often wipe out your good blogging intentions. However, you need to be aware of these five big blogging turn-offs that will have visitors fleeing your site in their droves.
- Having too many adverts
Having too many adverts on your blog is not only bad for the people who want to read your content; it’s now also damaging for your search engine rankings. See http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 to find out more.
Why would you go to all the trouble of creating compelling blog posts to then give people the opportunity to leave your site as soon as they find it?
- Rambling posts or rants
If you want to have a rant about a difficult customer or supplier, your company blog is not the best place to do it.
Equally, if you have no clear idea in mind for a blog post, don’t write one. A poorly structured post without any real point will definitely turn people off and reflect badly on your business.
- A weak headline
Poor headlines for your blog posts can also result in nobody bothering to read them. A wishy-washy title such as “What’s been happening this week” is hardly going to make yours stand out when you post a link to it on Twitter or Facebook.
It’s definitely worth taking the time to come up with a title that creates curiosity, grabs attention or makes people laugh.
- Posting when you can be bothered
I’m all too aware how much time running your own business can take up. However, posting a new blog when you can be bothered and then leaving a two month gap isn’t going to win you any fans.
When you make a commitment to blogging, you need to stick to it. A long time ago, I decided I would post three new blogs every week and barring the odd occasion, I’ve stuck to the task.
If you want people to return to your blog again and again, you need to give them something new to read on a regular basis.
- Going off-topic
Let’s say you’re a landscape gardening company with a blog. It’s safe to say people will expect your articles to be about the work you do, suppliers, things happening in the industry etc.
If they arrive on your blog one day and find you’re latest post is about something unrelated such as where you went on holiday or how happy you were to secure tickets for the Olympics, they’re likely to be confused and disappointed.
What other things turn you off reading blogs? Please leave your comments below.
Image credit: ImageAfter
Some good points, thanks. I hate it when you can tell people have been on Google Keywords and then pack their posts with ill-fitting and grammatically incorrect keyword phrases. Unlike yours!
Ian Jamieson recently posted..Advice For Teachers Bringing School Trips To Edinburgh
Thanks Ian. I always try to write my headlines and posts with the user in mind rather than the search engines. My aim is to write naturally and try to use my experience to help people. I think the way Google is going with more emphasis on the social side will hopefully put a stop to the SEO driven content we see on so many blogs. Cheers!