The Blog Squad surveyed a number of business professionals who had abandoned or lost interest in their blogs, to find out the key reasons they felt the blog had failed.

The top five reasons given were:

1. Not enough comments were left by visitors

2. Not enough subscribers

3. No increase in traffic to their main website

4. Difficult to come up with fresh new content for the blog every week

5. Couldn’t work out how to promote products and services via the blog

The Blog Squad put such “failure” down to a lack of training in four key business blogging areas: Content, Outreach, Design, and Action. Yes, that does spell out CODA.

Denise Wakeman said, “Many professionals simply don’t know how to use the features of their blogging platform. Furthermore, they often struggle with what to write about on a business blog. So their posts are infrequent, their traffic stagnant, and they don’t convert readers to clients.”

They reckon that over half of all business blogs are abandoned within three months, and unsurprisingly they reckon they can train businesspeople to establish a more effective blog through teleseminar training this month.

More fundamental, as far as I’m concerned, is that blogging just isn’t for everyone.

While I believe that most businesses today benefit from a web presence, I don’t believe that they all need to blog.

If you’ve nothing to say, and you’re developing better customer relationships and conversions using more traditional methods, then don’t take resources away from that simply because “blogging” is the new buzzword.

Bear in mind, too, that there are plenty of “experts” around who’ll claim to fix your blog in four weeks. It’s not (usually) that simple.

Author: Andy Merrett Andy Merrett is a London-based full-time blogger writing for several Shiny Media technology blogs and various other projects. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.