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By now the era of content marketing is in full swing despite AI and other challenges.
Woohoo! Many companies have high quality blogs by now!
Yet just because you publish content regularly on WordPress doesn’t mean you really blog!
Here are some examples and how to blog instead!
Corporate blogs? What do you mean?
What is a corporate blog?
It’s a blog run by a company. It’s usually a team effort.
The point of the blog is not just blogging.
The company usually sells something and the blog offers additional insights into that.
Yet it does not work automatically! Especially if you automate content without E-E-A-T!
Sometimes I see stupid blogging mistakes!
They are so fundamental that they render a corporate blog useless.
At the same time
it’s often easy to fix many company blogs once you know what to do!
It’s nothing I make up! I’m not talking about blogs that are already established.
Once you are a popular brand you can get away with murder.
Yet beware of publishing suicide!
Yes, I am speaking mostly of corporate blogs!
It’s not just those that started recently though.
Some of these blogs are more or less alive for a few years already.
By now most business owners have understood that you need a blog to be seen on the Web.
The content marketing wave and Google’s updates made simple websites obsolete!
When you only sell without providing some value for free second rate. You need helpful content by now!
In case you want to get people to buy these days you first need to get their attention first!
You either directly or succeeding on search and social media where again you need a blog to send people to.
Installing WordPress, telling someone with basic copywriting skills to blog from time to time and expect huge results doesn’t work though.
Here are the actual mistakes that are very common with business blogs run by companies:
Ugly or cluttered WordPress theme
Many business blogs overwhelm with features.
Dozens of stakeholders push their own agenda and you end up with cognitive overload!
Feature creep over time or the wish to make everybody happy from the start lead to often
- redundant menu items
- inconsistent design
- and clogged interfaces!
Likewise the content itself follows no common theme.
Some posts merely rehash press releases. Others are way too promotional!
Some are news, others are evergreen!
The topics vary too much.
It’s like playing country, hip hop and metal on the same stage.
Do you want a lot of meaningful engagement and content sharing?
Do you want to collect leads or even sell on your blog? You need to embed this functionality on the blog like a second skin.
Depending on who you blog for and for what purpose your blog should be designed and written accordingly.
In case you wonder how a proper UX design for a modern site/blog looks like just look at these minimalist themes!
Rare, irregular postings
A blog is like a mix of a diary and a daily newspaper.
Both of them require daily attention ideally. Publishing regularly helps to build an audience of returning visitors.
Three posts a week are enough to thrive once the blog works!
Anything below two posts a week is not enough to capture an audience and make it revisit regularly by itself.
In case you really only manage to blog weekly or monthly at least make sure that it’s somehow regular.
Try to publish at the start of the month or in the middle of the week so regular readers know what to expect and when.
Just decide upfront! Is your blog a
- daily
- weekly
- or monthly
publication? Then try to stick to it! Make readers revisit habitually.
You won’t be able to post at least once a month? Then a blog may be not right for you!
Some people tend to believe that every blog post has to be huge and perfect!
Thus they spend too much work on the one ideal post while their audience goes somewhere else.
I worked for a company once where I had literally to ask a dozen “stakeholders” to approve a post or add/change something.
- The marketing director had to OK the strategic outlook.
- The project manager had to verify the time allocated for it.
- The unit director had to make sure the content reflects the business goals.
- The entry level SEO needed to add “keyword density” even though I optimized it already.
- The actual editor had to fix spelling and grammar and fix my writing while at it at the last minute (which was unasked for).
- The editor-in-chief had to check the “tone of voice” (“we” instead of “I”!)
- The programmers of the tool the unit made had to check whether I depicted the technical intricacies right.
- The graphic designer had to locate some images for it (I was not allowed to get something off Unsplash myself).
- Even the art director had to approve the looks of it! Sometimes he disliked the resources I linked out to e.g.
I already forgot what the others wanted. It was really hard to get anything published on time.
Also the final outcome was heavily watered down and inconsistent after everybody got their changes introduced.
Yet I was usually gullible when something went online late.
On another corporate blog my contract got cancelled after a month!
They disliked the initial trial post because a young editor disagreed with me on Google SEO intricacies.
IMHO she just didn’t know yet what I already knew and only referred to an out of context quote by John Muller (Google’s spokesperson).
She was the boss so I had to leave despite decades of experience.
The blog post I was meant to replace with mine was still showing a year later with obsolete advice.
It’s a bigger blogging mistake not to blog frequently than to blog often and make some mistakes while at it.
There is an exception to this rule of course. Brian Dean of Backlinko! Why?
He has become a huge success by publishing articles just a few times per year but working like up to 100h on one resource!
You can combine both frequent and high quality posting by going evergreen content though as Brian shows as well. The solution?
Updating it regularly. I constantly update my existing content, often for more than 10 years.
Impersonal, public relations writing style
Whenever I see a post saying “we” I assume the blog is either a bland or of poor quality.
When your writers have names it’s still not enough. Blogging is about unique voices!
When people aren’t allowed to voice their own opinions they get boring!
You can’t abide by strict corporate rules of dealing with the public or the result is writing that becomes
- indifferent
- impersonal
- public relations
Blogging is more than just “digital PR” though. In 2025 Google started focusing increasingly on originality.
Talking at people instead of talking with them results in a monologue nobody listens to.
Don’t broadcast, try to start a conversation with each post.
Blogging is not about advertising your company or your products. Blogging is about the reader. What does s/he like, need and want?
Give it to the reader as often as possible. First of course find out who your readers are and what they like, need and want.
Use real language you would use with your friends at a party without corporate newspeak!
Cut out the buzzwords and self important superlatives. In case you’re awesome let your audience tell you so.
Long, fuzzy or cryptic headlines
Corporate blogs often talk gibberish!
Even those from Google are cryptic! It’s often very difficult to understand what a post is about.
Often it starts with the most important part of a blog post, the headline.
It should be both enticing and still explaining what it’s about.
A leading blogger can call his blog post “this is it” but you can’t.
You can do it when you have a regular audience but how to get one that devours each of your postings?
Make sure you can motivate the casual readers that happen to visit your blog to stay and read the posts actually.
No or downright wrong images on posts
Most people are so busy on the Web that they scan texts and lists of headlines instead of reading!
People increasingly just view the images that appear along the posts.
- No image
- irrelevant image
- the wrong image
may mean that they don’t even look at your headline.
An image catches the attention so add one, make it relevant enough to be able capitalize on what it shows!
It should be really eye-catching. For a boring topic like SEO I usually use metaphorical images!
Do not just illustrate your words with a matching but perfectly boring image nobody cares about.
The image should also work by itself. So always ask yourself whether you would like to show the image to someone else! Why?
Is it so striking or or does it just work as an illustration when you read the text.
Many blog posts about Google just feature the Google logo!
Yet that’s not enough! It’s often also kind of a let down: some even feature the old Google logo that has been replaced many years ago!
No value proposition on the post level
What is the actual value you provide via your blog?
It’s not purely self-promotional (one huge ad) I hope.
- Does your post save time for your readers because you curate resources for them or summarize current developments?
- Does your post enable and empower your readers to “do it yourself” whatever you are blogging about?
- Is your blog post eye opening to the extent where your readers can change their mindset?
What is the exact value on the post level you provide?
How do you word the value proposition? An
- “overview”
- “best of
- “101”
is a great value proposition for time saving. A
- “how to”
- “guide”
- “tutorial”
value proposition is great for DIY posts.
Just make sure every single post has a value beyond mere self-promotion of you and your products and services.
Self centered choice of topics
Do you think you are the most important person in the world?
Well, a lot of people think like that, that’s why they are not interested in you.
Readers want to know more about things they care about. Why should they care about you?
Unless you are a hyper-established brand like Apple that can get way with anything literally you do not want to talk about yourself!
Especially not all the time on your blog. Your blog is not about you, it’s about your readers.
Thus even in cases where you write about yourself make sure to add a benefit to such posts for your readers.
Make them replicate your successes or learn from your failures.
Cultivating an audience on third party sites
Many businesses try to catch the latest hype.
It may be Quora, Instagram or Pinterest – there is always a new must use site every year.
Why are these sites so hyped? It’s their business model.
They need critical mass as fast as possible so they can sell their users back to advertisers.
The more users the better, thus the influencers are hailing each new platform.
I made the same mistakes with a few platforms like Google+ for example.
Luckily I always focused on my blogs so that the lost time and effort hasn’t been as bad.
What will happen when Facebook shuts down your account?
Or when it is not the cool kid on the block anymore like happened my MySpace, Friendster and the likes before them?
What happens when an evil billionaire takes over your favorite water cooler venue and renames it to x?
Will you still have an audience? Make sure to get people to subscribe to your blog via
- feeds
- push notifications
- mail.
Focus your social media efforts on bringing your audience back to your own place, your blog.
It’s not that hard to fix these mistakes
You see these are pretty basic mistakes!
It’s nothing spectacular you can’t overcome once you can identify them as mistakes.
Invest some time and effort and you can not only fix those issues!
You will reach more people and convince them to stay with you.
Your blog is your castle and your content is king within it. Other than that content by itself is not enough.
Like in chess you won’t succeed with “great content” only but without it you won’t for sure.
Most importantly: always blog as an individual and never as a company exec.
Your kingdom are the people who read your blog!
Yet don’t forget we live in a democracy not a monarchy so you can’t force them to read your blog.
* Creative Commons image by William Cho