I often talk about the need for businesses to have blogs. I talk about how they can help with search engine optimization, promoting one services and products, and giving the business of personal voice.
 |
All that is good and well, but now it’s time to refine things just a bit more. I am seeing more small businesses getting into blogging, but there’s a few things that a lot of them need that would really help them to go further.
I thought about going for five points in this post, but I thought that I would just stick to three and make this a quick hitter instead. So let’s look at the top three things you’re probably doing wrong with your blog.
1. Is the name that showing on your posts “admin”?
If so, this means that you haven’t gone into your users area and changed the name that you want showing from admin to your name. If you’re writing your own posts, you want people to see your name associated with your post as opposed to someone else’s name, or admin. After all, you’re looking for name recognition.
If you have a blog that has multiple writers, each writer deserves to have their name associated with their post. By the way, if you have your name associated with your post you also have a way of setting up your name with Google so that if people find your blog through the Google search engines your name and possibly your picture, if you set one up to show up with your name, will come up as well. Google says they’ve killed this, yet I’ve noticed when I’m signed into Google that I still see some people’s images next to things I’m looking for.
2. Are you linking to other articles or other blog posts that are on your site or on your blog when you write your new posts?
This isn’t something you can probably do all the time, internal linking, but what this does is gives people an incentive to check out some of your other information that on your site, and keep them on your site a little longer. Studies have shown that the longer someone stays on your site the more apt they are partake of some of your services or buy some of your products. It’s a great advertising opportunity you shouldn’t miss.
3. Are you engaging your audience by responding to comments or asking questions within your articles?
I should have started this by saying that if you don’t have comments open you don’t really have a blog at all; you’re just talking to people. This is a bias of mine; so sue me. lol
If you are accepting comments, you need to make sure you take time to respond to them. You don’t necessarily have to respond to every single comment, but those comments that are really good you should respond to.
Every once in a while in your article you should ask a question. Did you notice that I asked some questions above? Asking questions helps get people engaged, even if they may not read a comment. If you can make people think, most of the time they will appreciate that and they’ll want more from you.
There you go, three things you should check to make sure you’re doing. Are you doing them? Let me know.
