Business blogs can be an effective medium to demonstrate authority, build a brand and generate leads for your business. But given the sheer amount of blogs being published each day, your strategy might fail to bring results without a proper marketing roadmap. In this article, we take you through five reasons why your blog marketing strategy may not be working for your business.
Not adding enough value
Blogging is not a numbers game. Over 2 million blog posts get published each day. It does not matter how many more articles you add to this mix; blogging as a strategy will only work if you add enough value to your readers. So how exactly do you add value?
To begin, your blog post should be on a topic helps your target customer. Secondly, it should offer a unique perspective and must not simply be a rehash of what you can already find on the internet.
Finally, it should offer a definite takeaway or foster a discussion. In the absence of this, you provide no incentive for your reader to bookmark your content or share it with others.
Not targeting the right keywords
The success of media outlets like BuzzFeed has fostered a culture of clickbait headlines. This is a good strategy if your core focus is on building a user base from social media platforms.
However, websites like Facebook have been cracking down on clickbaits in recent times. Also, given the fact that most businesses rely on advertising or organic channels like SEO to bring in their target audience to their website, it is important for your article to target the right keywords.
Modern day SEO practices do not demand ‘exact match’ titles or keyword phrases in your article. But focusing on one topic at a time makes it possible for Google to understand the context of your article and ranking it on top for relevant search queries.
Inadequate word count
While it is true that quality is more important than quantity, the word count of your articles does have an impact on their performance. The simple reason here is that given the sheer number of articles being published on various topics, long form articles have a distinct advantage over short articles when it comes to ranking on Google search.
In addition to this, it is simply not possible to write a comprehensive well-researched piece in under 500 words. Having said that, make sure that there is no fluff and every word in your article deserves its place. Lengthy articles that are long for the sake of it bring down reader engagement and this can impact SEO performance and customer conversion.
Not marketing your content
Writing a high quality blog post alone is no longer sufficient to bring in readers to your website. For a successful business blog strategy, it is also important to promote your articles. Sharing on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter should be viewed as best practices which need to be followed for each of your submissions.
It is also a good idea to use Facebook advertising to provide the initial traction to your articles. Successful business blogs also make it a point to execute PR and link building campaigns for each of their blog submissions. This helps optimize your blog articles for the keywords they are targeting thus enabling better visibility on search engines.
Measuring the wrong metrics
How do you measure the success of your business blog campaign? Do you look at your visitor count or Facebook likes to evaluate the performance of your articles? These are good metrics if you are an ad-supported website.
However, a business that makes use of blogging to grow its paying customers need to measure performance with the help of alternate metrics that will provide them with the right perspective. For instance, a business selling software products would measure the success of its blog posts by measuring the number of downloads or free trial requests.
A business offering mortgage solutions would measure performance by the number of loan requests they receive through online applications or through phone numbers advertised on the blog pages.
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