5 Blogging Don'ts

Blogging for your brand can be daunting — regardless of whether it’s your first or thousandth blog post. We all want to do our best at representing our brands and inspiring our audience to take action.Confession time: Whenever I sit down to start a new post, my mind is momentarily paralyzed. Every time.When this happens, I fill up my oversized Avengers mug with tea and remind myself of the following five rules for blogging. And, sure enough, my fingers loosen up and I start typing.1. Don’t be too promotional. Your audience reads blogs, listens to podcasts and watches videos to be educated or entertained (and in an ideal world, both). They are not on your blog actively seeking out an advertisement for your brand’s latest product. So, if you take away nothing else from this blog post, remember the #1 rule of brand blogging: Don’t be overtly promotional.Do be helpful and in touch with your audience’s needs. Everyone wants to learn how to do their jobs better and easier. Deliver that to them. Research the challenges your target audience is facing and provide them with how-tos, tips, and tools that address these issues.Educating your audience should be your blog post’s primary focus. Once you achieve that, then (and only then) can you consider including a call to action or product mention tied to your brand.2. Don’t make your readers work too hard. Think about how much of your day is dedicated to browsing news sites and reading. I’m guessing it’s not a lot.  We’re all busy and if we have any time at all to read an article, it’s only a few moments. Many of us are also reading posts on a mobile device.What we don’t have time for are large, inscrutable blocks of text and unwieldy Q&As that meander from topic to topic.Do frame your blog post so that it’s easy for readers to get to the point. That means using section headings, bullets, and other formatting elements . Or taking an interview transcript, highlighting the best insights and structuring the final post so that your reader doesn’t have to dig through the rest.Although it means more work for you as the writer, you don’t want to give your readers an excuse to go elsewhere. 

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