#fail: How to Write B2B Blogs that Suck

There are a lot of ways to fail at B2B blogging and sometimes we feel as if we have seen them all, but then from out of the blue – and yes, the internet is in fact, mostly blue; we looked it up – will come a daring and original new form of just plain terrible blogging.

We’re looking at you,                   .com

But you don’t have to be super creative to fail at B2B blogging. There are plenty of ordinary ways to create B2B blog content that is limp, unreadable, ineffective or that actively repels or offends your prospects.

We’re going to walk you through some of the best ways to accomplish all of those things, because while the concept of terrible blogging can be somewhat subjective, terrible B2B blogging happens in some pretty specific ways.

With decades of experience in B2B marketing, content writing and journalism, the members of the Innovaxis team have accumulated deep expertise around the topic of terrible B2B blogging. And by that, I mean we’ve even created a few painful examples from our own hands over the years.

The point is, you can trust us. We’re experts. Also, we measure the results meticulously. And when something doesn’t get the right results, we’re fearless about going in and identifying WTF just happened there? The point is: We’re really big on results.

Here are some of the best ways to avoid them in your B2B blog writing efforts.

The Complete List of Ways to Achieve Absolutely No Results with Your B2B Blogging

1. Write about yourself. A lot. There is nothing that B2B prospects and customers like to read more than smug and prolific posturing. We’re the best! Go Us! Pat yourself on the back and slather on the adjectives like butter on a waffle. Toot your own horn while you’re at it! Show your prospects that you understand the obstacles and challenges they are facing with lots of pictures of your team celebrating how absolutely awesome you are.
2. Copy what your competitors are doing. Out of ideas for your next blog? That’s why the internet was invented. Your inspiration is just sitting there at www.DittoThat!.com It’s just like your mom used to say, “If everybody else is doing it, shouldn’t you be doing it too?”
3. Skip the keyword research. Doing this right takes way too much time. It’s always changing, for one thing. And frankly, who knows better what your prospects should be searching for than you do? Why not just reverse engineer the process and beat Google at their own $161 billion game?
4. Hire inexperienced writers. Writings are not hard. And besidz, the era of texting has made conventional ideas around grammer, spelling, avoiding clichés and stuff like that so … you know… What is that word?
5. Stick to the Rules. They must be true because there are a zillion so-called content experts out there preaching the How To’s. Google “What is the exact right number of items in a list blog? What is the perfect number of words in a blog? What is the best letter of the alphabet to start your sentences for SEO? Somebody out there has the an answer. And that will use up a lot of time and effort you would otherwise have to spend creating blogs that your prospects actually want to read.
6. Don’t Spend a Lot of Time Interviewing and Fact Gathering. Asking a lot of questions and taking the time to really understand your subject matter is a giant vacuum cleaner of time-consumption. And time-consumption = money using, as the saying goes. Just ask the newspaper industry.
7. Storytelling is for Suckers: Nothing will bore your audience faster than content that follows the arc of effective storytelling that human beings have instinctively been drawn to going back as far as Aristotle. As somebody once said, a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich.
8. Seven. You can’t go wrong with a number everybody agrees has magic properties. Okay, so not everybody, everybody. There is some consensus around 25, and a few outliers pushing for 17. We also found some data around 36%. The point is, nothing drives great storytelling like forcing it into a shape dictated by internet data wonks with a bar graph. “Headline Preferences by Gender” is one of our all-time favorites.
9. Don’t Sweat the Metadata: Think of this as your failsafe in the effort to really suck. In the event that you create content that is accidentally engaging and effective, a poorly-crafted or forgotten meta description will ensure that it disappears into the bottom drawer of the internet beneath the linty cough drops and old Post-it notes. No one will ever find it.

Of course, there is no such thing as a complete list of ways to fail at B2B blogging. We were just kidding about that. Also “complete list” scores higher than “endless variations” on the Headline Analyzer Tool Thingy.

But now that we think about it, it might be easier for us to show you how to create B2B blog content that doesn’t fail. That succeeds, even. If that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, give us a call or click on the link below.