25 Reasons Why Your Business Blog Sucks

Your business blog sucks because…

1. It’s duct-taped and stapled onto your existing site with no thought to how to integrate blog and web site or an overall redesign
2. It’s on Blogger, which makes you look cheap and/or like a spammer and nobody likes Blogger’s commenting system
3. It’s on TypePad, which means it’s probably ugly and because it’s hosted someplace else from your main site, you have a very fractured idea about its visitor analytics combined with your business site
4. You have comments turned off — turning off comments means turning off your customers
5. You write posts that sound like commercials instead of a real person having a conversation (see comments above)
6. You never link to anything, either because somebody misinformed you that would be a bad idea or because you simply don’t know how (note to self: write a post explaining the basic skills and knowledge needed to blog)
7. You hired a black hat scam artist passing himself off as a search marketer to spam blog comments from here to kingdom-come
8. You have no idea how your blog is supposed to support business objectives and therefor you have no content strategy
9. You have no idea who your ideal customer is and therefore you don’t know how to write for that person
10. Instead of providing useful business blog content to both existing and future customers, your blog is full of dry, boring crap
11. You never comment on anybody else’s blogs
12. You think of your blog as a “marketing channel” which is a euphemism for corporate propaganda
13. You don’t know how to tell a story or you’re too cheap to hire someone who does
14. You only post three times a month
15. You used an off-the-shelf template and didn’t even bother to at least put your logo at the top or remove the sponsored ads
16. The last time you posted was back before the winter of last year, and everybody knows it because unknown to you, more people land on your blog than your main site
17. You write your posts in Word and hand them over to someone else to post (in other words, you are so disconnected from what blogging is really about that there’s no way in hell you are writing anything worth anybody else’s time)
18. You think the blog is about you and your business, instead of the success of your customers
19. You think blogging is just another form of internet advertising that you don’t understand
20. The lawyers have to approve every post
21. You have a giant “Protected by Copyscape” badge on the blog, which makes you look silly because it’s highly doubtful that you’ve written anything so compelling that anybody would want to steal it–and it won’t stop them, anyway
22. You have a big legal disclaimer on the blog about something… anything (put that stuff in another page and link to it)
23. You keep referring to posts as “blogs”
24. You think the IT department should run it
25. And finally… your business blog sucks because it isn’t doing ANYTHING for your business

I know there can be way more than 25! Your additions are welcome in the comments.

Photo by Ben Stephenson