Do you publish a blog for your business? If you do.....I'd like to talk about some humiliating mistakes you should actively avoid, especially if you are trying to position yourself as an expert. As someone who helps maintain, publish and promote the business's of others, I've learned the HARD way that it's often MUCH easier to embarrass yourself (or your clients) if you aren't careful.

(And I'm NOT talking about the pictures of myself drinking a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 out of a beer funnel from 1995 that were circulating around my Facebook friends list last year). I'm talking PROFESSIONAL embarrassment. And the kind of things, that if you're maintaining and publishing blogs for traffic, publicity and profit, you MUST avoid to keep your sites ranking well, and raking in the cash.

- Check Your Blog Settings Before You Publish Your Very First Post: Depending on what platform you are using (I exclusively use WordPress and recommend you do, too) and what version you are running, you MUST check to make sure you're blog is set to be "public". Want an example of why? I was working on a campaign for a client a few months back and we had created all sorts of killer content to promote their newest offer. Articles, press releases, social strategies, link building techniques, you name it, we did it.

Yet, a few weeks later, the client emailed me to tell me that their site STILL wasn't indexed in the search engines. And when I checked, he was right....all of the STATIC HTML pages were up and ranking, but all of the work MY team did, wasn't showing up at all. Anywhere. Guess what? I totally forgot to change the initial setting that even ALLOWED the engines to "crawl" the blog. I had it set on "make this blog private". Not good, right? Thank god I've got caller id, because I was able to avoid getting screamed at for a few days until we got the whole thing straightened out...:-) Don't make this mistake if you are a professional blog consultant - it IS embarrassing!

- Respond to Your Comments! I think this is embarrassing. Maybe you don't...but I was sort of taught at a young age that when people ask you questions, or say nice things about you, or compliment your work, it's polite to respond! It amazes me how many people don't....or how many "gurus" will tell you that they don't even read their blog comments. (after asking people to leave them for the latest "launch" nonsense) I'll tell you what: Last night?

I listened to an hour long interview with Seth Godin, the marketing genius behind the "Purple Cow" and "IdeaVirus" theology - and he said he gets 5-600 emails a day. And responds to each personally. That's what being "remarkable" is all about...and while we all may not get there, taking the time to interact with people who care enough to comment is a GREAT way of saving face, making friends...and BUILDING a business blog that people truly love.