Blog Mistakes You Don't Want to Make

If you're like us, you learn quickly from making big goofs. So when I saw Lee Odden's post about the three big blogging mistakes he and his company made in the first 3-4 years with their very successful Online Marketing Blog, I said a big "thanks, Lee, you are saving us from doing the same things!"

I'll be bending Denise's ear tomorrow about these three errors so that we can avoid them. For all you readers who are blogging for business, take heed. Here are summary points from Lee's well written post over at WebProNews:

Mistake Number One: Goals

When we started the first version of Online Marketing Blog in December of 2003, there was no specific business goal ...

Make no mistake, any blog is a work in progress and despite the huge impact Online Marketing Blog has had on our business goals (build thought leadership, contribute to search community, lead generation), we’re still fine tuning to make it a better resource. By setting specific goals for the blog, we have benchmarks and accountability measures in place to make it a productive use of time and resource for readers.

Mistake Number Two: Control

Since blogging for us started as an experiment, we didn’t take it too seriously. As a result, we used a third party blog hosting platform with a sub domain url at blogspot.com.

Why would we do that? It was easy. It was free. There was a base of functionality that met our needs at the time.

Why shouldn’t you host your blog using a third party domain name? You have no control. If you want to change blogging platforms, there is no reasonable way to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new address.

Mistake Number Three: Metrics

Hand in hand with goals are metrics. We ran our blog for a full year before implementing any kind of web analytics software. Ouch! Another issue can be a focus on the wrong metrics. Many bloggers get obsessed with who’s linking in, who’s mentioning their name and what their Technorati ranking is.

The important thing is not to obsess over metrics that do not support the purpose of the blog.

Conclusion:

You may be the kind of person that learns best from making your own mistakes, but if you’re not, I hope you can learn from ours. What blogging mistakes have you made and learned from?

Comments

[Period Fine Bindings]

Hi there
If it hadn't been for Margaret Stead, I would have made lots more mistakes than I have done with my blogs at http://www.periodfinebindings.com
As you can see I'm still making formatting errrors!

She's written a great book for newbies that's available online called 'Blogging for Beginners.' (The first edition was sold out in the UK but it's now being reprinted in the US)
Regards

Paul