Better Blog Marketing: What are you writing about?
So you jumped on board and created a blog to promote your website and it’s not working. The blog just isn’t attracting traffic. What’s wrong? The first place you should look is the content. Chances are, you’re not creating content that’s meaningful and accessible to your desired audience.
I add content to three blogs on a regular basis and I can always tell when I’m not putting enough effort into one of them. Visitor count goes down. And then I look at the last entry and it was from more than a week ago, or the content isn’t focused enough on the topic at hand. What do I do?
First, I re-evaluate my priorities and see if what I’m putting effort into is what is really important to me. For example, it might be fun for me to write my Pizza Thursday entries but that doesn’t really draw traffic to the website maintenance news site.
Next, I look at the topics I’m blogging about. For example, I can write about the technical nitty gritty of website maintenance. But do my customers really care about that? My customer is looking for someone to maintain their site because they don’t want to deal with the details. My ponderings on some obscure topic (XHTML special character codes, for example) don’t matter to my desired audience.
Finally, I look at the headline. Is there something in the headline that will grab my desired reader’s attention? Is it something that will stand out on a list of search engine results? If not, I rewrite it. For example, the headline for this entry has gone through three revisions so far.
A final tip: make your blog entries “skim friendly.” A reader in a hurry needs to be able skim the article and get the main ideas. Keep your paragraphs short, bold the main entries and make sure your text is readable.
Blogs can be a good marketing tool, a way for you to connect with new customers, but you have to add content that’s interesting from their point of view. If your marketing efforts aren’t working, take a hard look at what you’re writing about and how you’re presenting it. Chances are a few tweaks will make a big difference.