Most companies fail at blogging because of their incorrect assessment of the time investment involved. Blogging has the potential to build an audience and profitable business, given time and the right strategy.
According to Orbit Media’s survey, most bloggers take an average of 2.5 hrs to create each blog post, while some of them take as many as 6 hours per post.
That’s a lot of time that many companies can’t afford to invest. While outsourcing is an option, it doesn’t rid you of the responsibility of creating a strategy, reviewing posts and promoting them.
This post discusses 10 reasons why your blog posts are failing and how you can remedy them.
1. You’re overselling
Years of having promotions forced down their throats has left the audience with a bitter taste for marketing.
If people are on your blog, they have already expressed some amount of interest in your content and possibly products. While it’s alright to subtly mention your products where relevant, it’s critical to not go overboard with ads.
If you must promote a product, say when a product launch is in the works, it’s best to be transparent about your motives.
Note how some of the best brands market their products.
HubSpot does market on their blog but transparently. The SaaS company’s products are hardly ever mentioned in the body of their super-useful blogs, but only suggested at the bottom of every blog page.
The best blogs provide genuinely valuable information, without ulterior motives.
A good way to judge the quality of your blog is by assessing audience on-page behavior using a tool like Hotjar. This tool’s webpage heatmaps can help you assess content performance
2. You’re under-promoting
Every successful blogger plans promotions.
The plan contains email marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
While content can go viral without any external prompt, it’s important to note that the probability of that happening is very low (maybe as low as 1 in a million or more).
For the rest of the content on the internet, an absence of promotion efforts spells doom.
One of the mistakes that many marketers make is not covering all bases when marketing.
Do you have a presence on the right channels?
Is your promotion frequency for each post enough? Remember that not all of your audience will see it in the first go. If you can’t dedicate time to content promotion, use an automated-publishing system.
Simply add social media posts to libraries on DrumUp and set-up a repeat schedule for maximum exposure.
3. Your readers see no reason to return
In his book, The Curve, Nicholas Lovell observes how there are millions of customers who will pay nothing for your products and a few customers who will pay anything for them.
To build a loyal audience who can contribute to the business you should focus on the second type of customers.
Who are they? What are their likes, dislikes, and concerns? See them as individuals and not groups of people.
There are several ways to get people to keep coming back.
The first impression matters, ensure that you optimize your landing page design, make navigation easy and share relevant and useful content.
But most importantly, create a memorable personality.
Take, for instance, the Wait But Why blog. One of the reasons why it’s ingrained in my mind, apart from its content, is its presentation.
Wait But Why has the most interesting, memorable illustrations.
4. Your SEO isn’t effective
Google will send tons of traffic your way if you optimize your blog pages for search, and search traffic is invaluable because you can direct incoming traffic to conversion-optimized pages based on intent.
How? Use long-tail keywords.
The best thing about long-tail keywords is that they’re very specific. The words that form them tell you what website visitors expect to see on your website.
Keywords used in titles, and particularly at the beginning of titles, are the most powerful. You can also label images with keywords (img tags) to improve SEO.
5. You have vanilla content
With millions of blog posts being published daily, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of conventional posts.
Unless you want to be forgotten and ignored, it’s important to develop a unique and memorable personality.
Are you meeting your visitors’ expectations? Are you sharing information of value with them and entertaining them?
Unless you are, your bounce rate is likely to be high, further decreasing your search ranking.
One way to decrease bounce rate is by enticing website visitors to comment. Make your posts conversational. Choose debatable and slightly controversial topics.
Check out, for instance, the Ahrefs blog, which always has compelling headers.
6. You have no pre-set goals
Many bloggers ignore the benefits of having well-defined goals. Many others leave goals as faint thoughts in the back of their minds, thoughts that may not necessarily pay attention to or implement.
Instead, if you chose to document your goals, you might end up with better results.
What could blogging goals be? They could range from improving website SEO to collecting leads.
To improve website SEO, you have to focus on keywords, and write long, thorough guides over 3,000 words long.
To collect leads, you have to optimize your opt-in forms and offer something that’s valuable to your audience in exchange for their email addresses.
7. You haven’t considered the intent
According to Search Engine Land, there are 4 micro-moments that make online visitors land on your website.
- The “I want to buy” moment
- The “I want to know” moment
- The “I want to go” moment
- The “I want to do” moment
Each of those moments represents entirely diverse mindsets that need to be addressed differently for the best effect.
Many companies use blogging strategies that reflect what they think visitors want and not what they want.
One of the easiest ways to assess intent is by typing a keyword in the search bar on Google and making a note of the autocomplete suggestions. The suggestions are popular searches.
Neil Patel’s website, and QuickSprout and CrazyEgg all get right to the point on their blog/website landing pages.
8. You’re ignoring shareability
Presentation matters; more than you know.
The colors you use can improve the shareability and conversion potential of your posts because each color has a different psychological impact on different people.
Blue, for instance, universally increases trust among people. That’s why hospitals typically have blue walls.
Apart from colors, the readability of your posts also matter. The wrong font styles, sizes, and spacing between paragraphs can convince readers to skip your post.
Even if you get colors, spacing and font styles right, people aren’t likely to share your post unless they can do so easily. Sumo has an easy-to-use share plug-in fits perfectly on all devices.
9. You’re disregarding PR
As Andy Crestodina, founder of Orbit Media, says, “Never waste a good conversation by having it in private.”
Every great conversation you have with customers and partners is beneficial to only the participants of the conversation unless you publish it.
You create this type of content constantly, as you write emails and have phone conversations through the day. These conversations are not only bait for others who have similar concerns but are in general great for PR.
Ideally, every PR opportunity you identify on social media should be used to maximize exposure for your company.
Neil Patel, for instance, swears by commenting on other blogs as a means to driving real traffic and generating real revenue.
10. You don’t have a community
Every successful blog has an engaged and loyal community. One sign of a healthy blog readership community is the comments that you receive on your posts. If you aren’t getting any comments, chances are that your content isn’t engaging enough.
When developed properly, your blog’s community can be full of future customers, which is why you should invest in building one if you haven’t as yet.
One way to attract the right readership is by finding out where your audience hangs out online and participating in those communities.
Fix your blogging mistakes!
Your blog could be a serious source of business, new and recurring, provided you optimize it to attract and engage the right audience. The ideas on this post present a great way to get started.
What would be the first step you want to implement from this list?
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