Business Blogging Mistakes That Surface in Year Two

Enough companies have now been blogging for two or three years that a new category of mistakes has become visible, distinct from the launch-stage errors of 2005 and 2006. These are the ones showing up in blogs that started strong and then went wrong later.

The early burst that quietly stopped

A lot of companies launched blogs in 2005 and 2006 with real enthusiasm, publishing several posts a week for the first month, and then the pace collapsed to nothing once the initial novelty wore off. A blog with its most recent post dated over a year ago now actively hurts a company, because it signals abandonment to anyone who finds it through search. If a blog can’t be sustained at its original pace, the fix is scaling the frequency down to something realistic rather than letting it die entirely.

Deleting every comment that pushes back

Some companies have started treating any critical comment as a PR problem to be removed rather than a conversation to have. GM’s FastLane Blog set a different example: Bob Lutz routinely let critical comments about GM’s own vehicles stand, and responded to them directly. A blog that only ever shows agreement stops looking like a real conversation and starts looking curated in a way that undermines the trust blogs are supposed to build.

Writing for search engines instead of people

As blogging matured, some companies leaned harder into keyword-stuffed titles and repetitive phrasing aimed at ranking rather than at answering a reader’s question. That approach tends to backfire on two fronts: readers bounce quickly from posts that don’t deliver on the promise of the headline, and search engines have gotten better at recognizing thin, repetitive content over useful writing.

Letting legal and communications review flatten the voice

Blogs that survived their first year sometimes lose what made them work in the second: as more people in the organization get involved in review, posts get sanded down until they read like every other page on the company’s site. The specific, opinionated voice that made a blog worth reading in the first place is usually the first casualty of a heavier approval process.

Chasing every new format at once

With podcasting and online video both getting attention this year, some blogging teams have spread themselves across three or four formats without doing any of them consistently well. A business blog that adds a podcast and a video series on top of an already-inconsistent posting schedule usually ends up worse at all three than it would have been focused on one.

Never revisiting what’s working

Two years into blogging, a lot of companies still haven’t looked back at which posts brought in the most traffic, leads or search rankings. That’s a missed opportunity: the topics and formats that already worked are usually the clearest guide to what to do more of, yet teams keep guessing at new topics instead of doubling down on proven ones.

Most of these mistakes share a root cause: treating a blog as something that, once launched, runs on autopilot. It doesn’t. It needs the same ongoing attention in year two and three that it got in its first enthusiastic month.