If you’re a business blogger then be aware that most business blogs are doomed to fail within their first three months of creation. Our advice, keep your posts fresh, topical and most important, spam-free.

Now that we’ve covered the public service announcement, here’s the good news. We believe one of the key ingredients to being successful at anything is to first identify the root of the problem. In this case, in order to earn achievement points in blogging it’s important that you understand why most people are unsuccessful and furthermore how you can avoid it.

First, let’s go over a few primary benefits of running your own business blog. According to American Entrepreneurship, “3 Benefits of Blogging for Small Businesses” they say blogging for your business:

  1. Is an affordable way to promote your own busines
  2. Is an additional Source of Revenue
  3. Encourages Repeat Customers

It seems they believe that the benefits of having a business blog should be for notoriety and profit. Benefit #2 implies the use of placing Google Adsense type Pay Per Click programs on the business blog itself.

Creating a blog solely based on advertising and revenue purposes is one of the biggest mistakes bloggers can make. The appearance of any advertisements on a new blog, especially Adsense ads befall as tacky and easily detract visitors. Moreover, their points only encourage business blogs to be self-interested and to have a non-engaged readership.

BlogMaestro believes a business can benefit from keeping a blog and as such:

  1. Blogs allow you to create a personal voice for your business other than standard PR speak.
  2. Blogs will help you to acquire prospective customers and to build additional loyalty with current ones.
  3. They provide you with a platform to be an industry expert
  4. Search engines such as Google love websites with fresh content and typically rank them higher than those sites that have not been recently updated.
  5. Blogging is extremely easy and requires very little start-up expertise. (Typepad.com, Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, LiveJournal.com)

Seasoned blogger Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad provides us with “5 Reasons Business Blogs Fail”. (via Blog Herald)

  1. Not enough comments were left by visitors
  2. Not enough subscribers
  3. No increase in traffic to their main website
  4. Difficult to come up with fresh new content for the blog every week
  5. Couldn’t work out how to promote products and services via the blog

Bloggers thrive from the comments that their readers leave them. One of the main reasons for blogging is to receive an immediate response. Something that you can do as a blogger that might help increase the number of comments you receive is to engage your readers. Consider when writing your blog that you want your audience to learn or even somehow benefit by your posts.

We covered item number two quite a bit in our last post “Professional Tips For How To Increase Blog Subscribers”. In case you missed it, our main argument is that you want to leave your visitors wanting more as well as give them the ability to subscribe to your blog so they don’t have to wait and search for your RSS feed.

Our third point can get somewhat technically complicated. We often see many business bloggers hosting their blog on another network and fail to tie-in their corporate template. If you look at our site, BlogMaestro, notice how we offer our visitors the ability to view our blog while at the same time giving them the ability to click over to our other products and services.

It is significant for us to spend time planning how to handle the display of our public blog. It made very little sense for us to attract visitors to another domain when we are also building our brand awareness.

The primary reason why most businesses blogs fail is because they’re not kept fresh and up-to-date. Instead, bloggers feel that they need to “out blog” their competition in order to be successful, and in doing such, they try to invent unnecessary posts.

A good suggestion is to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. You can do this by subscribing to and tracking what bloggers in your industry are doing. Keep free flow conversation and never force topics on your visitors. If you want to appear to be an expert, try writing about your current industry events or trends.

Finally, the promotion of products and services is the last thing a new business blogger should do. It’s understandable that you’re looking for a return on your investment (the time spent blogging) but you need to focus on the bigger picture here. Once you build a subscriber base and a loyal following you can slowly start to advertise your “Specials” and “Deals” and your readers will have a better trust for you and your product or service.