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In the first part of this series I discussed corporate blogging mistakes such as using a blog as a substitute for a conventional Web site, not standing behind what you write, posting anonymously, lacking an authentic writing voice, and not focusing on a set of core topics.

In this second and final part I continue my look at some common corporate blogging blunders.

Infrequent blog posting schedule

A professional corporate blog should have a regular, established schedule -- not just whenever the blogger feels like it. A corporate blog must be treated like a marketing and informational tool, not a hobby. While it's not necessary to run it as strict as a print magazine's publication schedule (but if you wish to, more power to you), readers should at least have an idea of when to expect new content.

I cringe every time I run across a blog where the "latest" entry is one month old. My first impression to this is that the blogger (and the company who sponsors and sanctions the activities of the blogger) isn't taking the blog seriously, can't be bothered to make regular posts, or approaches the blog too casually. If you feel obligated to manage a blog without really having the motivation to do so, you may as well not have one. A lackadaisical blog is much worse than no blog at all.

What you, as a blogger, can do to keep your blog entries regular is to shorten the length of each posting. You don't need to wait a whole month to give readers a giant blog entry with ten different stories lumped together -- people probably won't bother reading it anyway so you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, cut that giant post into ten individual, self-contained posts. Giving users a little bit of new content frequently is a lot more effective at retaining readership than giving them a lot of content in one shot once a month.

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Not organizing content by context

Most popular blog creation and management tools provide bloggers with a dynamic calendar that keeps track of all posts. While a calendar is a useful way to organize this type of serial content, people usually don't search for articles by date, they search by subject matter. Because of this, a calendar should never be a blog's sole means of navigation.

Readers don't associate particular entries with their publication date. A date provides very little information about the contents of blog entries. Readers rarely think, "I'd like to read those entries from December 2006"; they think, for example, "I'd like to read about the company's most recent activities in the European and Asian markets."

Not syndicating blog content

Readers don't always have the time to visit a blog regularly. A single blog is probably just one in a hundred pieces of information that readers have to deal with daily. Content delivery is vital in maintaining regular blog readership, and there's perhaps no better way to syndicate a blog that with an RSS feed.

Most blogging tools have RSS publication capabilities built-in so make good use of it. RSS is a common, and widely used, method of broadcasting and syndicating information, allowing readers to get updates when they become available without having to give out their personal information like an e-mail address. Bloggers also don't have to worry about strict spam filters that can cause false positives -- something that's quite common in e-mail based content delivery.

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