I was speaking with Mobile Marketing expert, Adam Small, last night and he vented to me about a recent meeting.  A "business consultant" came in and told him how he was going to transform his business... without even asking Adam what his business model, pricing model, competition, challenges, etc. were.  Adam quickly ended the meeting.

There are two huge mistakes that I see most businesses make when it comes to blogging:
  1. Lack of strategy
  2. Lack of measurement
Most of the problem is the disinformation that is spread on the Internet.  Blogging seems to have this magical and overstated impact on businesses today so every marketer is turning to blogging to help drive their bottom line.  But business blogging strategies are failing... miserably.  Some sources estimate that up to 75% of business blogs fail.  Not our clients.

Additionally, there's an explosion of social media experts and blogging experts out there that started a blog a few years ago and now they're going to tell you all about how it's going to help your business.  When it doesn't, they leave you in the dust to clean up.

If your "expert" hasn't defined strategies and goals, and instead, threw a free blogging platform up and sent you a login...

Fire them.

You can't hide from these folks - just do a few searches for corporate blogging and strategies out on the web. Participate in a regional blogging conference. Count how many talk about your business and how you drive customers.  Count how many talk about measuring results.  Most don't.  They talk in terms of vague and unmeasurable strategies like engagement and transparency.

Fire them now.

Authority, engagement and transparency are all valid tactics when writing blogs for business, but the ultimate goal is to grow qualified leads through search acquisition for new prospects and upsell opportunities by building relationships with current clients.

The reason I'm telling you to fire them is because the work they need to do is very basic.  Researching your company to get a solidified keyword strategy and finding you a platform to execute on it is a first step.  Next is measuring the results!  It takes 10 minutes to build a custom report in Google Analytics that will provide you with:
  1. Popular content on your blog and the conversions it lead to.
  2. Keywords your blog is being found for and the conversions it leads to.
Keyword and Conversion tracking in Google Analytics
By measuring our traffic and conversions, we know exactly how conversions are developing by our web visitors.  We have goals set on each of our calls to action, See the spike in goals on November 17th?  That was our recent webinar!  More webinars will be coming!

Our staff knows what to blog about, when to blog about it, and how to integrate other marketing strategies to fully leverage blogging.  Does your blogging "expert" do that for you?

If not, fire them.