Half of new blogs abandoned

A survey carried out last month by the Blog Squad™, has revealed that 50% of newly-created business blogs are abandoned within 90 days.  Survey respondents were asked what their chief reasons were for letting their blogs go.

The top five reasons are as follows:

1. I was not getting very many comments to my blog posts
2. There were too few subscribers
3. Did not notice any increase in traffic to the website
4. Coming up with regular, new content was too much effort
5. Did not see a clear way to promote our products and services in the blog

It boils down to the fact that many busy business people simply consider a blog an extra chore – one that they do not know how to achieve a level of return on.

"Many professionals simply don't know how to use the features of their blogging platform," explains Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad™ www.blogsquad.biz.

"Furthermore, they often struggle with what to write about on a business blog. So their posts are infrequent, their traffic stagnant, and they don't convert readers to clients."

Denise says that blogs are incredibly powerful tools to bring new visitors into a website and encourages them to revisit.

The Blog Squad suggest four main areas that a blog-owner should focus on.

Content – Firstly, blog posts need to be written frequently.  Secondly, they should contain valuable information that is useful and wanted by your target market. Don’t forget about the strategic positioning of your keywords.  If your time is an issue, then delegate it to someone in your business with writing skills. And if there is no-one that fits the bill, contract it out to a reputable news and/or copywriting agency.

Reach – Your blog has to get out there into what they call the blogosphere. This is the term loosely used to describe the community made up of the blogs and the people reading the blogs. By reaching out to other bloggers in your industry, you become part of this section of the blogosphere and your site will naturally find more readers.

Design – Make your blog easy on the eye and to use. Overuse of fancy javascript, plug-ins or other widgets can be distracting for users. Keep the sidebars simple and don’t stuff them full of irrelevant material.

Action – Make sure you involve your readers. Allow your readers to contribute by requesting feedback.  Actually ask for their comments in your posts. Ask for ideas. When there are enough readers, put a relevant poll on the page; this can also be a great market research tool.

More and more businesses are seeing blogging as an economic way to market a business, engage with customers and enhance the organisation’s brand, reputation and sales. Before deciding to discontinue or indeed not even start a blog, at least be aware of the considerable benefits of successful blogging.