Social media is a great tool for business but time and time again I see businesses fail. Either because they just don’t know any better, or they have no real goals and plans for their social media campaign. Here’s 21 reasons why your business blog may fail to perform.

1. You are on Blogger or Wordpress.com. If you are a business you should have your own dam domain name people.
2. You are using TypePad which means your blog is most likely ugly and not hosted on your own site.
3. Like one and two, you have no integration. Integrate your site and blog for a better content flow.
4. You think your business blog is only about your business. Post customer reviews and testimonials as well.
5. The last time you posted was Christmas of lass year. People read your blog to stay informed, so stay up to date with your information.
6. Commenting is turned off. This really blows, give your visitors a way to interact and make sure your comment features are working.
7. You think blogging is advertising. It’s not.
8. You are using the Wordpress default template with no company logo… Again you want to integrate the blog with your company website/branding.
9. You don’t know the difference between a post, and a blog.
10. You don’t know how to write to your customers on a blog.
11. You for some reason never link anything. Maby it’s to hard or you just don’t know how. Either way your readers are tired of Googling everything you are writing so link up.
12. Your posts plain suck. If this is the case: You are a business so hire someone who can set your blog on fire and create buzz for you.
13. You went overboard with SEO tips and now you have a Frankenblog. If you don’t know what you are doing, pay someone to do it for you as things change rapidly online and as a business you don’t have the time to spare.
14. You have all content approved by a lawyer. Useless, the best types of content are those that create legal problems.
15. You have a CAPTCHA for every user related action. How annoying are you?
16. All of your content is written by the marketing department and sounds like a sales pitch. Save it bitches, I’m looking for your business’s news and development. 
17. You require visitors to register or create an account before they can have any interaction with your business blog. FAIL.
18. You don’t have any spam protection. There’s nothing more embracing than a business with comments for penis pills and porn all over the place. Again you should be aware of the technology and service like Akisment that are available for your blog.
19. Unless you are dyslexic or something your content should be created write from your admin interface. Having Marv down in copyrighting come up with a post in Word and then send it around the office will most likely create an end product that no one will care to read.
20. Your business blog does no business, for your business.
21. You don’t know why or how people are getting on your business blog.

Most likely you know by now that commenting on other blogs can bring you decent traffic to start with. What most don’t know is that you can easily begin to use the tactic against yourself and hurt your blog or brand. Here’s seven ways you may be shooting yourself in the foot:

1. To Much Self Linking - Nobody likes a spammer and your not working with bots here. People can tell your a spammer when they see 3 links to your various blogs in every comment. This includes just dropping links with no comment, or irrelevant links and comments alike. A link here or there pointing to a resource or article related to the post is the way to go when it comes to link dropping. You will find people respond much better to the latter.

2. “That’s Great!” Comments - People can also tell your just baiting when all of your comments are 2-4 words in length. Combine this practice with dropping links and your sure to wreak havoc on your brand or blog. You could be placed on spam lists, blacklists, and people may realize what your doing and publicize it. Make your comments count and don’t go for quantity over quality because sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.

3. First! - Now that people are using comments for traffic, people have begun to post comments just to be first. There’s two ways to look at this one. First off, if you are posting a quality comment its not a big deal and can actually be a useful tactic. When you start to write two word comments just to snipe the first position you will annoy everyone on that blog quickly. Take a break and let someone else get the space for a while as well, people will respond better if it seems more organic than forced.

4. Spammy User Names - With the addition of the Top Commentator widgets on many websites, people did not miss a beat on filling their names with keywords. While this is not really a big deal, you can take it to far. If your name is 4 – 7 words long you are pushing your luck. Not only will it look unnatural but all of the keywords will make it appear spammy. This can again hurt your brand or blog and get you blacklisted on your niche sites.

5. Personal Attacks - There’s a fine line between ball busting, debating, and attacking someone. Aside from walking away with an altered ego, you can really do some damage to your reputation here. Whether a comment was misinterpreted or not be the bigger man. If you disagree with something and respond to it shooting from the hip, expect things to escalate. Unless you want a reputation for poppin’ off at the mount… Don’t do it.

6. Did You Read The Post - Always read the FULL post before submitting a comment. There’s nothing like feeling the impulse to write a comment and then realize you now look like an idiot because your way off base. If you do, it’s going to remain there and you cant do much about it. Developing a reputation for eating your words is sure to damage your brand, and credibility. Take a moment to look things over before getting into comments.

7. Comments Have No Value – While its a no-brainer it apparently needs to be reinforced. If you are adding comments to a blog that have no value you will quickly see a chain reaction with the end result being a damaged reputation for your brand. The easiest way to add value is by helping other commentors, posting relevant information or news, or in other words act as an authority. While it’s okay to crack a joke or two at other’s expenses you don’t want to be a bully so take it easy.

Bottom line: Remember that everything you post in a comment will be public and most of the time you cant edit or delete whats said. If you think something has the potential to damage you rep or your brand then don’t post it, its that simple.

When you first start blogging, getting new comments can be an exciting development. Not only does it let you know people are reading, but people are feeling the need to comment. Most importantly, the chance to build a brand and reputation is there. Building comments can be slow, and its not exactly an easy task for a new blog. Now that you know how to convice people to subscribe, its time to get some comments.

Be Direct And Ask For Comments
You can be direct as you want… For the most part people will actually respond as well. Ask our readers what they think, do they have something to add, or is there something you forgot to mention? Simple, but can be extremely effective.

Be Controversial
Controversial content can be a great way to get a reaction from people. And, if it becomes viral you can see a massive response of hundreds of comments. Naturally there will be some more aggressive comments but that’s part of the game, its up to you to decide whether or not censoring certain comments is necessary. I personally don’t censor anything unless it contains a lot of swearing, or anything explicitly adult. The idea is to have a debate going with both sides present.

Before I changed the focus of my blog I had done some posts about a Microsoft Xbox 360 contest called “X Marks The Spot.” Basically they would give you clues as to where you can find the green X’s and you had to find the word containing the green X. These words where spread across numerous websites. I thought it was to much of a pain in the ass so I built a SOAP protocol for the site. Microsoft for some reason did not feel the need to encrypt the list of answers so every night at midnight I would hop on and get the list within seconds then post it to my blog. The contest was like 60 days I think and within the first week I had over 1,300 comments on the 7 posts. By the end of the two months I had over 30,000 comments on my blog.

Offer Something For Comments
If can be frustrating having a large readership but no commenting. Contests are basically the bread and butter of incentivized commenting. Randomly selecting a comment very day, week, etc. for a prize can be very effective. You can offer cash, advertising, review services, tool access, eBooks, etc. A word of caution though: If your not careful on how often people can win you will most likely see an increase of useless + spammy comments.

Comment On Other Blogs
This seems to be a tip that I give in a lot of posts. It’s incredibly easy and it works so use it. Finding relevant blogs is easy as using Google or Technorati search. After you find some blogs make sure they will be easy to dominate comment wise. You want to make it to the top commentor position on blogs that have substantial traffic. Most people now have the Top Commentators plugin installed so this should not be a problem.

There are a lot of ways you can improve traffic on your blog. Some of them are no-brainers but there are also some that you probably haven’t thought of. Here’s seven untapped tips to improve your blog traffic.

1. Save your best posts for the best time.
If you are cranking out content, you should have a lit of posts waiting to be published. You know some of them are better than others so why not submit them on days your blog has higher performance. Take a few minuets to log into your analytics tool and see what days your blog gets more traffic and on those days, publish the best content you have in the line up. The better performance maximizes your chances of sharing, social mentions, bookmarks, backlinks, etc.

2. Answer questions.
If you solve peoples problems chances are they will continue to come back. If you are getting questions in your comments, and in your e-mail then answer them. Chances are it really won’t take that long but the more you increase your reputation, the stronger your blog and brand will become.

3. Get away from your computer.
Go to the mall, go out to eat… Go do something totally unrelated to computers, the internet, and blogging. Look for titles and text in the places around you and think about how they can help you. Use what sticks out on your blog and see what reaction it brings. The importance of titles has been mentioned by everyone, everywhere on the internet so it must carry some kind of weight. To generate hype around a post it will be necessary to create a title that’s just as good as the post itself.

4. Use your competition.
Subscribe to industry news feeds, and feeds of blogs in your niche. Know whats poppin’ in your industry and stay relevant. Your competition can be a great source of content. Not only the feeds can help you though. Why not craft a piece of quality content and submit it to a prominent blog. They get a quality post on the site, and you get some great exposure for your blog, name, and brand once again. This is highly effective and is no harder than if you where creating some content for yourself.

5. Update your posts.
Look at your posts and see how you can improve them. Can you make the details stronger, the title better, include more links? There are a lot of strange factors that go into creating a viral post. While it is just blogging, you can’t have horrible grammar. For the most part people wont mind (myself included) some simple mistakes. But if your post reads like it was written by a ten year old, you may run into some problems. Take the time to read over your posts and you will be thankful, chances are it won’t take long for you find some errors.

6. Interlink your blog posts.
If you post a great resource or a post that’s performing well, go back to other posts and link it. For instance if you write a good post about “linksys routers,” go back to five or ten related posts in insert a link to your “linksys routers” post. Work the link into the post so it looks natural. Another great technique is creating large resource lists and updating them to include your posts as time goes on. While the list becomes increasingly popular, all of your posts will too.

7. Keyword your high traffic posts.
A lot of the time you will notice that people end up at your content for related keywords that you don’t have in the title. Taking some time to work the keywords into your title can increase your search rankings, and the traffic that goes with it. Being on the first page of search results can be extremely beneficial for many reasons.

I don’t think people are realizing the power of personal branding. I think a lot of people still believe it does not work, or is not effective. Well, I have the perfect example of personal branding for these people.

That example is Jeremy Schoemaker. Hate him or love him the strength of his “Shoemoney” brand cannot be denied. He has become one of the most recognizable bloggers, not only by his logo but his face and name. He built this brand simply through blogging and using social media outlets. Something you can learn here on SmmGuru is that the information im giving you does work. Schoemaker has launched a number of services over the last year or two including AuctionAds (now ShoppingAds) and his ShoemoneyTools program. AuctionAds was bought by Media Whiz for an undisclosed price and ShoemoneyTools seems to be doing well also.

Why does this work… Because the Shoemoney brand has an audience. Jeremy is able to build massive amounts of press and traffic for whatever it is he’s promoting. Using the people he knows and his position in the blogging community, his blog has also been a go to place for launching related products and services. Once you have a name to brand, all you need to do is build your image online. If you can make your face as recognizable as a logo, chances are you will succeed.

And you should now understand that personal branding does work. Jeremy has mentioned that he makes over $300K a month on his blog and it’s all due to his brand name. Just like your favorite cereal, he has become a product of the internet with the ability to sell himself.

Another big mistake people make with social media is they have a tendency to direct to much towards their own content. Without a strong base of authentic posts, you will find any victory short lived as the traffic will know whats up. Finding the right balance between personal and informative posts is a delicate act when it comes to high traffic success. 

Once you have build that base to start on, you can start to build your brand in the community. Find members that share the same interests on other social sites and find relevant blogs. Commenting on other blogs is a fast way to get started as it always draws some amount of attention. Oh ya, the comments need to be relevant to. That means no posting “Hey great post check out my site puppet.com… ” If it even makes it through moderation, chances are it will be ridiculed. You are creating authenticity remember? Post comments that give real feedback, help other commentators, or even comical ones as long as they fit. Another fast way to get started is to link other posts that are relevant. I myself can say that I follow a lot of the new trackbacks to see whats going on and leave a comment. Another great way of letting people know you are authentic.

I call authenticity the fast track because I have seen the difference it can make. You will find that your content spreads much faster, to a broader audience when you come off as a more authentic person. Don’t believe everything your earlobe captures… Many will say spamming will work but social media is a different game. Search engines are getting smarter but you can still spam them, people however can tell when you are spamming and when you are being genuine, or authentic. Whatever success comes from your spamming will not last. Sooner or later search engines will say bye bye and the social media traffic will fall off as people realize you are there for self promotion.

Do you know how much of your traffic is returning traffic? If you don’t, you should! This can be an important metric when trying to increase your conversion rate. There are blogs that get thousands of hits a day but have 5 subscribers because they fall victim to some of these common mistakes:

1. Welcome Your Readers
Welcoming your readers can be the difference to them subscribing, or possibly leaving. Greeting your readers can make your blog more attractive and give your readers a sense of value. This by all means should be a simple one or two sentence greeting. After all, they are looking for the content. You could also take this a step further and track your incoming referral headers to display custom messages for sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others.

2. Stay On Topic
If your blog is supposed to be about cars and you are posting information on baking cookies, you have an obvious problem. You would think this goes without saying but many people tend to mix to much of their personal life in with their niche blog. Once and a while it’s all good, but when you post about yourself all day instead of your topic people will get annoyed. Narrowing down the content you give will draw targeted traffic that is much more likely to become social on your blog.

3. Your Content Should Be Valuable
The easiest way to do this is to create content that helps others. Before you publish, look for tips and information you can improve on. Add inside information, or information from your experiences that cannot be found on any other blog. You cannot expect to get back if you don’t give anything at all. Helping your readers will also build trust, which can be very important when you start to grow.

4. Connect With Your Audience
Taking a few minuets to reply to comments and e-mails can be much more beneficial than you think. This doesn’t mean you have to stock your readers and reply to every single comment but letting your readers know you are listening is important. It builds a stronger community and people are much more apt to continue reading. Also, show people where to find you on services like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and others.

5. Hold er’ Steady
Most important is to post regularly. Set your own goals, even if it’s just two posts a week you want people to know they can expect two posts every week. Humans love regularity by nature and when somethings out of whack people may respond adversely. Let them know that regardless of whats going on, they can count on seeing two posts a week on your blog. Some people find id hard to believe that people really follow blogs like this but it’s true. After some time on the web you will also find some blogs that you come to read regularly.

Don’t be afraid to comment with any ideas you have on converting visitors to subscribers. Although traffic is good, regular readers are even better.

One of the best things you can do when starting a new blog is submit it ti every blog related site you can. Here are 48 of the best places you can submit your blog. This will help create backlinks to your blog and get you some starting traffic that you can use to grow. And we all know what big traffic brings… Direct links to submit pages included.

Top 48 Places To Submit Your Blog – Don’t Forget To Bookmark

• Dmoz Open Directory Project
• B4Blogs Directory – Submit Page
• Best Blogs – Submit Page
• TailRank
• Blawg – Submit Page
• Top Blog Area – Submit Page
• Bigger Blogger
• BlogAdr – Submit Page
• Aviva Directory – Submit Page
• BlogBunch – Submit Page
• BlogCode – Submit Page
• Blog Directory – Submit Page
• Blog Watch
• 5 Star Blogs – Submit Page
• Bloggapedia
• BloggerNow
• Blogging Fusion – Submit Page
• Read A Blog – Submit Page
• SpillBean
• BlogIntro – Submit Page
• Blog Listing – Submit Page
• Bloggernity – Submit Page
• BlogListing.net – Submit Page
• Blogoozle – Submit Page
• BlogPulse – Submit Page
• Technorati – Submit Page
• BlogRankings
• Blogarama – Submit Page
• Blogs Collection – Submit Page
• MyBlogDirectory
• BlogSweet
• Blog Top List – Submit Page
• Blog Universe – Submit Page
• Blogz – Submit Page
• Brit Blog – Submit Page
• Blog Dust – Submit Page
• Blogdup – Submit Page
• BlogFlux – Submit Page
• GetBlogs
• Globe of Blogs – Submit Page
• Eaton Web Blog Directory
• FindingBlog – Submit Page
• I Blog Business – Submit Page
• LS Blogs – Submit Page
• BlogSearch – Submit Page
• Strategic Board – Submit Page
• Super Blog Directory – Submit Page
• Small Business Blog Directory – Submit Page

For all of you novices this should get you started on the right foot.

You have yourself a well built website, filled it with content, and you’ve been online for months but not much seems to be happening. Your blog is an important tool especially if you are a business. It can cut large amounts of work and save money by providing a place for up to date information. Here’s the top 7 reasons your blog may fail to perform.

1. You Have No Blueprint - Be sure to have a sole purpose when you create your blog. If you still don’t have one months in then its time to reevaluate what you what the website to do for you. After setting goals for the website, move into keeping on track. A steady work flow will ensure that people can count on the website to produce.

2. No Use Of Social Media - Branch out to various outlets to make your site known. If you have a defined market you will find that relevant websites drive much better traffic, consistently. I would take 350 primed users compared to 1,000 random hits any day. Get involved on Twitter, Digg, FaceBook, and the millions of others to start branding yourself or your company. Social media marketing is powerful already and it will continue to grow as the online world becomes more prevalent.

3. You Need The Right Audience - Before you worry about what an audience will like, you need to get one. Demographics have been used forever for a reason, they work. Being able to know how old, what gender, location, and much more can be very useful when marketing your brand. Once you have built this audience, you have an army of targeted traffic to play with.

4. Site Performance - People on the internet are whinny babies. With today’s high speed internet people don’t want to wait for crap, not even pictures of what you ate for dinner. They want everything literally at their fingertips and in an easy to follow fashion. Another bad idea is to have more ads than content on your pages… just another rule of thumb. Try to keep your page loads snappy and install WP Super Cache if your on WordPress. If you don’t use Wordpress, quit blogging.

5. Features Are Not Up To Date - Stay up to date on certain trends within web design. Keep your website looking fresh with new features that take advantage of advanced scripting and browser capabilities. They can not only add functionality, but cut down load times. Keep in mind that people like to think they have something exclusive.

6. Your Not In It To Win It - Your website is going to require commitment to sustain growth. For real, your website is never, ever going to be finished. And if you are thinking of doing a website full time for your source of income, this rule goes doubly for you. This does not mean that you need to post 40 pieces a week to your site. Not giving anything new back to your visitors will leave them feeling either two ways: 1) They leave feeling like there’s no point in returning as the website has not been updated in months. 2) You have built a large audience and your content flow is normally consistent and high in quality. Your readers could be the addictive type that visits daily if not hourly (lol) to see if there is anything new. While this is a great feat, you need to be careful. If you wait to long people may think you are going dorment.

7. Your Not Benefitting From Your Competition - Your competition is a great source of information! Lets be real people, you don’t think anyone looks at your site for ideas? So, why not look around the web and see whats up in your industry. Your all preaching to the same crowd so don’t let your competition become more appealing.

Tired of the same old, boring, introductions? Use these 6 strategies to write better introductions to your posts and content. Using these, your readers will be much more apt to read the rest of the content and get involved in some manor.

1. Don’t Write The Introduction First
Yes that’s right, finish the content first. You can create a much more enticing introduction if you know exactly what your content is. Sometimes you may write the introduction and instead of letting content flow creatively, you write content tailored to an introduction that most of the time won’t be as interesting.

2. Ask A Good Question
You might have heard this before but most say a “yes” or “no” will do the trick. Why strive for mediocrity? Push further and develop questions that require a real response that would require a full sentence or more. Not only will this be more likely to hook readers, it will also push people to become active on the site with comments, voting, etc.

3. Start With A Shocker
Shocking facts are always a good way to start. Did you know that on any given night in America there is anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million hobos sleeping on the street? Not only does this spark a reaction from the reader, but it let’s them know what they are in store for if they continue to read.

4. Start With A Good Quote
Whether it be controversial, factual, or comical, a quote can bring a sense of authenticity to a piece of content. The Internet is full of information and when people take the time to insert legitimate quotes people realize that your content must also be informative. Just make sure you state your source, and that the quote is relevant.

5. Open With A Problem / Dilemma
This is a great way to touch base with your users. Make sure to present both side’s viewpoints and encourage feedback. An introduction like this is more uncommon and more likely to catch users off guard which can be used to your benefit.

6. Ask yourself “what will people first think about this?”
Identify with what your reader is looking for and address the possible negative viewpoints on a piece. Take everyone into account and continue to lead them into your ideas. Readers are much more likely to continue reading if they feel like the content somehow pertains to them. When you learn how to do this, you will be unstoppable.

The Three Golden Rules:
1) Avoid the dictionary introduction. Its bland, boring, and just plain lame. You can do better!
2) It should hook readers in somehow and promise them whats to come.
3) Be brief. People spend a lot of time on the Internet sifting through huge amounts of content and if your introduction is a page in itself guess what they are most likely going to do?