Business Blogging Mistakes From the 2006 Launch Wave

Enough companies have launched blogs now that the failure patterns are easy to spot. Most of them aren’t about writing skill. They’re about treating a blog like something it isn’t.

Mistake one: letting PR write it, then pretending an employee did

A blog that reads like it went through three rounds of legal and communications review loses the thing that made blogging valuable in the first place: an actual voice. Readers can tell the difference between a person thinking out loud and a message that’s been sanded down until it says nothing. The fix is structural, not stylistic: let the actual subject-matter expert write the draft, and limit review to fact-checking rather than tone-policing.

Mistake two: not disclosing who’s behind a post

A software company drew sharp criticism in 2005 for compensating outside bloggers to write about its product without consistently disclosing the arrangement, and the backlash was a warning other companies should have taken seriously. If someone other than the credited author had a hand in a post, or if there’s any financial relationship involved, say so plainly. Readers who feel misled don’t just distrust that post, they distrust everything the company publishes afterward.

Mistake three: using the blog as a second press release feed

A blog that only ever announces product launches, funding rounds or executive hires isn’t a blog, it’s a newswire with a comments section nobody uses. GM’s FastLane Blog worked because Bob Lutz wrote about decisions, trade-offs and even criticism of GM’s own products, not just announcements. A blog needs opinions and explanations, not just news.

Mistake four: turning comments off, or never replying to them

Some companies enable comments and then never respond to a single one, which is nearly as bad as disabling them outright. The value of a blog’s comment section is the conversation, and a company that stays silent in its own comments signals it isn’t listening. Assign someone the job of replying, even briefly, within a day or two.

Mistake five: publishing in bursts, then going quiet for months

A blog with five posts in its first week and nothing since looks worse than no blog at all, because it shows up in search results as an abandoned project. Consistency matters more than volume. A modest, sustainable pace beats an ambitious one that collapses after a month.

Mistake six: measuring the wrong thing, or nothing at all

Some teams launch a blog with no sense of what success looks like, then either declare victory on page views alone or give up after a slow first month. Decide up front whether the blog is meant to build search visibility, generate sales leads or establish expertise with a specific audience, and check progress against that specific goal rather than vanity numbers.

Avoiding these mistakes isn’t complicated, but it does require treating a blog as an ongoing commitment from a real person rather than a marketing asset to be produced once and forgotten.