A blog should engage your readers and elevate your brand status. It's viewed as a very organic form of marketing that adds value to both your customers and your brand. However, if you don't spend time on your blog, it can actually have adverse effects on your business. Is your blog a brand-building asset, or are you making destructive mistakes?
Significant majority of businesses fail every year, in order to make things happen we need to have certain goals and principles in life and then never look back until we achieve them, blogging is same. As for defining goals, Manuel Bruschi of Due suggests,
Defining goals is the best way to move forward, but setting clear goals is not easy. Start small, e.g. "I want to spend no more than 1 hour per day answering my emails". Define, track, analyse, improve, repeat. You will get used to it pretty soon.
Avoid These Eight Mistakes
Many businesses confuse the ease of launching a blog and posting articles with the idea that success immediately follows. In reality, launching a blog and building a successful blog are two very distinct concepts. Most blogs - both personal and corporate - end up failing within a matter of months. In order to prevent your blog from becoming just another statistic, you'll need to make sure you avoid the following blunders.
1. Not Keeping a Content Calendar
If you don't have a formalised content calendar - something that can actually be printed off and posted on a bulletin board in your office - then you're setting yourself up for failure. This may seem like a dramatic statement, but bloggers who don't have a plan rarely last.
A content calendar is simply a calendar that says what you're posting, when you're posting, and what time it'll be shared. It's a visual overview of your blogging efforts and ensures you don't forget about anything.
2. Posting When It's Convenient For You
Let's get this out of the way: Your blog isn't about you. In fact, your blog isn't even about your brand. It's about your readers. With that being said, you can't resort to writing, publishing, and sharing content when it's convenient for you. Everything should depend on your readers and what they want.
What's convenient for your readers? Are they more likely to read a post at 7 a.m. before they leave for work, or do they prefer to read posts at 9 p.m. before turning in for the night? If your writing schedule doesn't align with your reader's preferences, you can always write content ahead of time and then use a post scheduler to publish at a specific hour.
3. Failing to Record Ideas Immediately
We've all had that moment where we sat down and couldn't think of anything to write about. In an effort to avoid having these moments, you need to keep a running list of topic ideas and add them to your content calendar for the future. This is something successful blogger and marketer Neil Patel suggests doing.
I recommend that you keep a running and growing list of article and title ideas. As you work on your blog, you'll probably have titles or ideas flying around. Get them written down as soon as you can! You'll be surprised at how quickly you'll forget an 'unforgettable' idea that you had just a few hours ago!
4. Not Having an Inbound Strategy
Just because you spend three hours writing, editing, and publishing a blog post doesn't mean readers will magically show up. Assuming that readers will discover your content on their own and failing to develop an inbound strategy is a fatal mistake.
Be thinking about things like SEO, social sharing, guest blogging, and link building. The more connection points you're able to establish, the better your traffic numbers will be.
5. Ignoring Blog Comments
If you aren't careful, your blog can feel a little one-sided for readers. After all, you're the one writing and they're the ones reading. Thankfully, there are opportunities to interact with readers, and you need to make the most of these chances.
Specifically, you should be responding to every single comment somebody posts on your blog. Even if you're just telling someone thanks for taking the time to read your post, this little bit of personal interaction goes a long way.
6. Using Content Spinners
In an effort to save time, some bloggers resort to "content spinners." These are tools that automatically take a post you've already written and rephrase your sentences so that you can post it again. Sounds great, right? Well, quite frankly, these tools are garbage. Spun content is easy to spot and is almost always incoherent.
7. Putting an Emphasis on Keywords
Keywords have their place, but gone are the days where you can keyword-stuff a 500-word blog post and enjoy SEO benefits. Today's search engines are much smarter than they were five years ago and it's more effective and high-returning to focus on semantic content with a couple of long tail keywords thrown in for good measure. Targeted keyword use is fine, but don't let it influence your entire blogging strategy.
8. Failing to Leverage CTAs
A company blog serves many purposes. It generates traffic, educates customers, and enhances your brand's value. However, in order to maximize the value of your blog, you also need to leverage calls-to-action (CTA) to drive conversions.
You never want your blog posts to feel like advertisements, but including one or two targeted sentences at the end can yield positive results. If you're leaving CTAs out, then you're missing an opportunity to capture monetisable leads.
Make Your Blog a Brand Asset
A blog can be your brand's biggest asset - if you let it. The key is to develop a plan and stick to it. Remember that it takes months - if not years - to launch and grow a blog into the marketing tool you need. Have patience and focus on doing the little things right.
In the end, you'll have an influential blog that resonates with your customers.