20 Reasons Your Business Blog is Failing

Buffer
February 18, 2011 By 4 Comments

Is your blog wilting?

Don’t despair if your blog isn’t attracting a stack of regular readers. Take a long hard look at what you’re doing, level with yourself and turn it around.

For starters, why not look for some of the warning signs that your blog could be in trouble. Are you:

  1. Blogging without a plan
  2. Starting without a vision
  3. Forgetting your blog needs positioning
  4. Failing to focus
  5. Picking the wrong blogger or team of bloggers
  6. Not varying the content enough
  7. Under-spending on the project
  8. Forgetting that blogs aren’t press releases
  9. Updating the site sporadically
  10. Crafting lifeless headlines
  11. Writing overly long paragraphs
  12. Publishing posts that would better work on another channel
  13. Allowing too many cooks (managers) to spoil the broth
  14. Not integrating the blog with other online channels
  15. Rarely mentioning your blog elsewhere
  16. Having an unimpressive topic
  17. Moderating every comment
  18. Failing to elicit a single comment
  19. Not reading other blogs
  20. Focussing too much on what other bloggers are doing

Your turn!

What other common signs are there that a business blog could be in trouble?

Filed Under: blogging
About Jon

Marketing and Communications Consultant. Head of Jontus Media. Podcaster. Life-long Liverpool FC supporter. Guarded by basset hounds.

  • Anonymous

    Great stuff, Jon! Here are a few to add…

    21. Not hosting the blog on your own platform or website.
    22. Forgetting that images, video and multimedia can add some pizazz to your blog.
    23. Not using lists, bullets, subheads and other ways to make the info easily digestible.
    24. Focusing on what YOU want to write, instead of what your readers want you to write.

    I could keep going – this is fun! ;)

  • http://www.jontusmedia.com/ Jon Buscall

    I spent an hour trying to convince a client of 21 this week! They didn’t believe me :(

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  • Anonymous

    Jon,

    Seems like you and I have very similar ideas on the world of business blogging. Most business blogs make me want to throw myself off a building (not literally of course). As you know from my post on grow, I head up a travel blog and of all industries, you’d think it would be easy to create interesting blogs. I read that a certain travel company has a 3 billion dollar advertising budget and their blog sucks for many of the reasons you mentioned above. I think this in and of itself could be a talk at Blogworld. But bloggers don’t need to here this, companies do :) .