Business Blog

Yeah, so the redneck in me is showing.

My grandfather used to say, “that dog won’t hunt”, when something was sub par, or it was obvious that whatever he was talking about wasn’t going to work.

So last night, the phrase, “that blog won’t hunt” kept crawling through that space between my ears I’d like to think contains a brain.

But what came with that phrase repeating in my mind was the fact that sometimes it’s true for business blogs. Sometimes they just won’t hunt. Customers that is. New sales.

The reasons some company blogs won’t “hunt” are endless. However, I wanted to cover a few of them today. If anything, just to get that phrase out of my head.

1. Blog posts are not relevant

How many times have you gone to a corporate blog looking for some information about the company, or it’s products, or it’s customer service, only to find that the blog is about something completely off topic?

Not only is it irritating to find a blog about the bosses favorite hobbies (do people really fly fish anyway..), but it does absolutely nothing to help me make a buying decision. Not a positive decision anyway. Nope, when I see that the company blog has turned into a personal one, I hit the back button and go looking for their competitors.

2. Blog is rarely, or poorly maintained

There are dates on blog posts for a reason. Because people actually look at them! If your blog hasn’t been posted to in more than a month, it looks abandoned to your potential customers. They want to see a website that’s current and alive. A company that’s attentive to their website and keeps it fresh and up to date. Because if they feel you are attentive to the website, you might be just as attentive with them.

The reverse of this is true as well. A blog with dust bunnies all over it paints a picture of poor customer service. People can buy your products and services from loads of different companies and websites. They want signs of good service after the sale. So don’t let your blog send them a negative vibe in this regard.

3. Spam Blogs

Even worse than a poorly maintained blog is one that screams spam to your potential readers. Using scraper scripts that post content from other blogs around the world fifteen times a day isn’t going to help you with them or the search engines. Yes, it might generate a bit of traffic, but converting that traffic into sales is a completely different thing.

Today’s internet users are not as dumb as you think. They know spam when they see it and they know crappy content too. Don’t fall for the lazy junk or push button blog software. Keep your blog clean and stay away from looking like a spam blog.

4. Annoying Popups and Javascript

Business blogs with popup windows, popunder windows, annoying javascript begging for their email addresses, floating boxes that they are having trouble closing, etc. I know, you read from some guy with a really long internet sales page that you should always try and squeeze this information out of your readers. Yes, you might even grab a few email addresses for your mailing list. But how many potential customers are you losing?

People hate annoying stuff. And these little monsters are annoying.

5. Blog posts that look like lies

Stop, I repeat, stop putting numbers in your posts like this:

The next five four people that buy our product will receive a free set of Ginsu knives! This offer is only available for today, for five four lucky people!

Please. I beg you. You are insulting the intelligence of everyone that reads this junk. No one is stupid enough to think that you will only sell your product to the next four people. No one really believes that you only have four of them in stock.

It is not an effective sales tool, nor an effective method to make sales. If you truly only have a few items that you are trying to liquidate, say so in a more professional way.

So let’s wrap this up for today…

Of course, there are a million more reasons why a corporate blog might be a loser, but you get the overall gist of it I’m sure.

Here’s the deal.

Make your blog hunt.

Make it work as a means for generating more sales for you and your company. The internet is a wonderful way to generate new customers and more sales volume. But when it comes to your business blogs, please be professional. Please provide quality information and good interaction for those that happen to read them.

It’s a karma thing. Work hard to have the best business blog in your particular field and you’ll get much more back then you ever imagined.

Tags: blog, Blogging, business blogs, professional, sales

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