There’s plenty of blogging advice out there, including this one: The Six Biggest Mistakes In Corporate Blogging.
Author, John Lincoln, opens with this:
Content marketing, like any other business initiative, is a learned skill. It’s not as simple as sitting down at your keyboard and typing out a few bits of advice relevant to your niche. (It actually used to be a lot like this, but now it is much more competitive.) In fact, corporate blogging is a learned discipline, just like accounting, marketing and good management.
This might be true in the corporate world, but if you’re a local business then blogging isn’t that competitive yet. How many of your local competitors are blogging as well? Not many, I’d suggest.
To summarise John’s list, he includes these six mistakes.
- Failure To Take SEO Seriously
- Not Promoting Content To The Max
- Not Writing Long Enough, Interesting Enough Posts
- Not Taking The Time To Build Communities
- Not Getting Other People Involved
- Giving Up Too Soon
All good pointers for later on, but I have one biggest mistake for small business blogging. And it’s simple: not starting.
Your first post probably won’t be a Pulitzer Prize winner. And neither will your second. But if you don’t start you’ll miss out on all the benefits of having a blog, and you’ll never get better at it either!