Note from Howie: Here’s an edited account of a conversation I had with Dave Taylor of Intuitive.com about the top mistakes people make when blogging for business. Enjoy, and make sure to follow any/all of the links at the bottom for more good stuff from Dave.

Mistake #1: Writing about your product rather than what your customers care about.

If your blog is just frequently updated sales literature, no one’s going to engage, no one’s going to care, and no one’s going to come back.

Mistake #2: Not attributing individual authors.

Your organization has a blog, but there are no individual authors and no human personality. There’s no sense of someone representing the firm, just some abstract sense of "what the company believes." That’s very retro-1950s, and doesn’t fit in a Web 2.0 world.

Instead, pick someone in your organization (or multiple people) and let them be the voice of your company.

Mistake #3: Not allowing comments.

This is a classic mistake. Whether you’re going to have to take your lumps, or whether you’re going to have people praising you, need to be OK with having that happen. If they go and write things that are not true, or legally actionable, then it’s wise to delete them. But if they don’t like what you do then the best response is actually to respond to them in your blog. What a lot of companies do is to say, "Well, we don’t allow any comments." Or, "We only allow comments that are positive, cheery ones that support our company." That quickly becomes transparent and obvious.

And it loses credibility as a venue to discuss that company’s products or services. And that’s tough, because in the traditional MBA-marketing business world, you need to control the message. The last thing you should ever do is  build a website where people can come and look and see that there’s stuff you do that isn’t good. People think, "That’s what the rest of the world is for. My site should be about me and how wonderful I am."

And that’s thinking about it as a marketing venue, as opposed to thinking about it as a whole new way of communicating with your marketplace and your customers.

Mistake #4: Setting false expectations of publication frequency.

A lot of blogs post two or three things a day during the first week, then one post a day or every other day over the next few days, and then three months down the road it’s once a month if they think of it or remember it or can find the time to add a few paragraphs.

That’s a disservice, because it actually tells everyone in the online world that you don’t value them as customers. What I much prefer companies do is learn to pace themselves. If you really think that your ultimate frequency of publication will be once a week, then start out there. And that’s OK. There are some blogs out there that post 20 things a day, and others post once or twice a month. Both can be really good.

Mistake #5: Not participating on other blogs.

This is a big mistake. And it doesn’t have to be the CEO of your company;  it might be someone in engineering or customer service, but the odds are really good that, whatever your product or service, there are people out there on their own blogs, or in their own social media spaces or mailing lists who are talking about your products and maybe complaining about them or saying they don’t understand your product or don’t see the value in it.

It’s far far better to find that conversation and participate professionally and respectfully. Now you have a lot of people watching and potentially being converts. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: You and I are on a snowboarding mailing list, and you post something on the list about how you got this new Burton snowboard and your really love it, except the way that the binding connects to your boot stinks. So every time you end up falling off your board, it takes you 20 minutes to put the binding back together and put your boots back on, because your hands are so cold and you’re wearing gloves. If someone from Burton reads that, they might say, "Oh, they must have a board from that one run we did that had a defective clasp."

What they could do is contact you off-list, but that would be a mistake. What they should do instead is respond on the list itself: "You know, I work at Burton and i know exactly what you’re talking about. We had this one small run that was messed up. Send us your board, and we’ll fix it with the right bindings and send it back to you. It should take no more than 20 seconds for you to put your board back on. If it’s still a problem with the new binding, we’ll fly you out and look at how you’re doing it because we want to fix this for everybody."

Now if you do something like that, all the other people on the list are saying, "Man, I’m buying Burton next time. These guys really pay attention to us." That’s true not only on mailing lists, but on blogs as well. Blogs are even better in one respect, because your comment sits there forever. So two years from now, when someone happens to Google "bad binding Burton snowboard" and gets to the page, there’s your comment - a guy who works for Burton saying, "We’ll fix it."

The vast majority of companies don’t do that. What they do instead is sue customers for writing bad things about them. Can you think of a more idiotic way to treat people who want to give you their money?

Mistake #6: Not writing about your product/service enough.

Don’t to go the other extreme and write too much about your industry and not enough about your product or service. You need to mix it up. If I sell digital cameras, I want to write about new cameras that come in.

I want to write about the experience I had going sailing with this new waterproof digital; about why I decided we weren’t going to carry it. Maybe every single picture any of the staff took came out terrible. And the manufacturer said, "It’s all calibrated properly; that’s just how we like to do it."

Writing both positive and negative reviews of products gives you great credibility. If someone’s Googling about that camera, you’re going to be seen as an unbiased source of information, with huge credibility, because you’re saying that not everything is perfect. When you do make a recommendation, you’ll likely be believed. And bought from.

The main thing is to make sure you’re professional and do everything on the up and up.

Mistake #7:  Concealing your bias/affiliation.

If you are with the Acme Camera Company, then just say "This is the Acme Camera Company blog" or  "This is Mike Smith’s blog. Mike Smith is Director of Photography at Acme Camera." People then know that one of the things you do for a living is sell cameras. People will know that you get lots of new gear, and they’ll understand why you like to talk about the most expensive things and the coolest. And that’s fine - I can accept that. It’s very different from "Mike Smith, Digital Photographer."

Reader: "Um, how do you get ahold of all this stuff?"

Mike: "Oh, I sell cameras for a living."

Reader: "Well, you should have told me that."

That changes how the reviewer reads the blog. That’s the restaurant reviewer problem: if the restaurant knows you’re a reviewer, they’re going to treat you differently, so now you can’t review it properly. In this case, you maintain credibility not by being unbiased, but by being transparent as possible about your biases and your interests. People understand you want to make money. They just want to know the rules you’re playing by, so they don’t get hurt.

Bonus Tip #1: Have fun doing this.

The more you can look at it as something you enjoy, the more that will communicate to your readers and the more they’ll enjoy it and get engaged. There’s nothing less pleasant to read than writing that’s just forced out, because it’s yet another thing on their to-do list.

It should be fun. It’s an opportunity to engage your customers and have a frank discussion about what does and doesn’t matter about your product or service. What’s important in your marketplace should be absolutely like getting a free dessert after you’ve had dinner. There’s nothing more valuable to you in learning how to make your company more successful than being able to be in honest dialogue with your customers. And that’s what blogging is all about.

For more words of wisdom from Dave Taylor, one of the pioneers of the online world and a passionate advocate for doing well by doing good, here are some good places to go:

http://www.intuitive.com/blog for Dave’s Intuitive Life Business Blog.

http://www.AskDaveTaylor.com for an award-winning daily dose of specific Q&A about technology, marketing, and gadgetry.

If you want to learn how to blog your way to business success, definitely check out Dave’s Business Blogging course at http://www.blogsmart.com.