Top 5 Reasons Your Blog is Useless
Categorized in: Content
Business blogging can be extremely beneficial, but only if you are doing it properly. If you find yourself frustrated that you’ve invested time and money into your blog but aren’t seeing any kind of return, it’s likely that you are doing it wrong. Too often, people believe that find blog post ideas for your B2B business is difficult, but nothing could be further from the truth!
Your B2B business blog is only as valuable as you make it, which means that there are plenty of content opportunities out there. You just need to know how to avoid the most common pitfalls.
Before ditching your blog, make sure you aren’t guilty of the following:
Writing Promotional Posts
Blog posts aren’t supposed to be pitchy or use any kind of sales speak. They are supposed to be informative and provide the visitor with inside knowledge. If your blog posts are filled with promotional language and include a bunch of links to interior product or service pages on the site it will turn your visitors off.
Being Predictable and Boring
Post different kinds of content on the blog to attract a wider audience. If all of your posts are similar in nature it will get boring after awhile. Get creative, especially when it comes to developing clever and engaging titles that will attract readers’ attention. Think outside the box and make analogies to current topics and trends.
Letting the Blog Go Inactive
One of the keys to successful blogging is to actually blog! It’s absolutely crazy how many businesses let their blog sit inactive for weeks, months, and years at a time! Not only is this unprofessional but it also results in lots of missed opportunities. Business blogging isn’t something that can be done when you have some free time. That’s what a personal blog is for. It’s necessary to dedicate a specific amount of time to blogging on a regular basis, preferably daily or weekly.
Not Optimizing
If you operate a business blog it’s likely that you know a little bit about SEO. When writing blog posts it’s important to consider SEO and incorporate keywords. Blogs are a great place to go after long tail keywords that you couldn’t target on the other web pages. Optimizing blog posts properly improves the chances that they will be found organically in the search engines and continue to deliver traffic over time.
Not Promoting
It takes awhile for a blog post to achieve organic traffic. In order to get it noticed it’s important to promote it. Include a link on your website homepage, submit the site to blog directories, utilize social media, and contribute guest posts to other blogs to increase awareness and generate traffic to your own blog.
Are you guilty of thinking you can’t find topics for your blog posts? Here are some techniques that can help you find ideas:
Turn Questions into Blog Posts
Every question your customers and prospects ask you can easily be turned into a blog post. In fact, it is safe to assume that if one person asked, many people were wondering the same thing; they just never took the time to get in touch. This tactic is helpful at every part of the sales cycle because questions can range from gathering information about your company to asking support- related questions. In fact, this is an especially important tactic early on in the sales cycle because often, your prospects don’t know what to task yet.
Ask Your Sales Reps
Even though the blog writing should be left to the expertise of your marketing department, your sales reps will have valuable insight into the types of information that their prospects are looking for. Ask them to periodically submit to you a list of frequently asked questions so that your marketing team can craft a series of posts that your prospects will find helpful and informative.
Does this all seem like common sense? Are you thinking that you are doing none of those things but still can’t find success? Remember, content marketing of any kind, including blogging, is a long-term strategy. The key is to stick with it. One blog post isn’t going to result in a quick uptick in sales or conversions. It’s about establishing trust with target audience members over time.
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