How many times have we seen a company do this? They start blogging, and their initial efforts are less than spectacular. We forget that many of us had the same hiccups when we started our own blogs. It takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to run a successful company blog. By now, many blogs need a checkup.


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A few months ago I wrote an article for MarketingProfs entitled Ten Steps to Starting a Company Blog. Even as I was writing that article, I had in mind to later write a followup article that would cover what happens if a company starts blogging, and they run into problems. There's no shortage of advice available to companies on how to get started blogging, but not a lot out there to help them after the fact.
I recently was contacted by a company that wanted to improve their blogging efforts. Their blog wasn't having the desired results. But they were posting almost daily, and several members of the company, from the CEO down, were involved in writing for the blog.
The problem was, the blog wasn't positioned from the reader's point of view. It was presented as an "online brochure," with every post focusing on one of the company's offerings. There was zero interaction with its readers, and no reason for the readers to interact with the bloggers.
How many times have we seen a company do this? They start blogging, and their initial efforts are less than spectacular. We forget that many of us had the same hiccups when we started our own blogs. It takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to run a successful company blog.
The natural inclination for many companies is to use their new blog as a promotional tool, which is exactly what will turn readers off immediately. And many don't understand how valuable it can be to receive feedback from readers, or how to encourage that feedback.
And these are some of the reasons why I wanted to write my latest article for MarketingProfs, "Eight Ideas for Revitalizing Your Blog," which published today. I want to encourage companies to start communicating with their customers via their blogs, but I also want to see that they get solid advice so that they can stick with it if the effort isn't netting the results they were hoping for. I know I made plenty of mistakes when I started blogging, so why should companies be any different?
What are some of the blogging mistakes that you see companies making, and how can they correct them?