Your blog can be a crucial ally in your quest to win the digital marketing war. A company blog can not only act as a marketing tool to spread the word about your products and services, but can help engage with customers and leads too. If all that isn’t enough, Google adores a good blog so it can be a superb way of getting highly targeted traffic for your most prized keywords. We could go on – blogging can help foster credibility and trust, and allow you to promote the more human and personable side of you and your business.
It’s no surprise then that many entrepreneurs clamber onto the blogging bandwagon with a great deal of gusto. The problem, all too often, arrives when they review their Google Analytics only to find that no one is actually reading a single word they publish. More often than not, the culprits are one or more of the below:
1. It’s Just Too Spammy & Like A Sales Letter. A blog is by no means meant to be a direct sales letter. Yes, it’s there to help you brand and loosely talk about your products in a light and breezy way – but blogs aren’t there for the hard sell. Some SME owners fail to make that distinction, and so their entire business blog tends to read like one giant and eye rolling sales letter. Take a long hard look at your recent blog posts – are they well balanced and articulate, drawing interesting industry news and commentary or are they all about your products and services (and of course how wonderful they are). The odd sincere post about a big new launch or development can certainly be justified – but other than that, look to inform and entertain rather than promote and sell.
2. It’s Stuck On Page 1,255,812 On Google. Another big common problem why no one might be reading your blog – no one can find the damned thing! Creating a blog is but one part of the blogging process. Promoting and marketing it is quite another. Both are epic if you wish to see success from your business blog. There are many ways of improving this. Target your post keywords with care, and get your blog backlinks into authority sites. Further, when you make a new post promote it on your other media (including your Facebook, Twitter, Forums and more).
3. Zzzzzzzzzz. Dull posts can be the death knell for a blog. Why do we read things? To be informed and entertained. If your blog posts are too autonomous and robotic, and read as if they were written by the most boring person on earth – not only will any visitors click away, they wont come back! Every post should be one of quality that your target audience will enjoy reading and get something out of.
4. It Has Poor Presentation. Perhaps you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – but believe me, people do. A good blog will not only have killer content, but looks to match. That doesn’t just mean a nice theme and colour code – the right balance between text, media and ads are important too. Too many of any one category and you might be putting off visitors from exploring your blog further.