4 Reasons Why Your Blog Failed
Content marketing can bring a boom to your business. Writing blog posts attract potential leads, customers, and establishes your brand.
But if that’s true, why are so many out there struggling with it?
It’s because if you do it the wrong way, it could turn into a nightmare. You could sink money into a project that will never recover its costs.
Have you ever published a blog post and gotten crickets?
Believe it or not, it’s not complicated to turn your disaster around.
Reading over the list below will help you come up with winning solutions. For some of you, it might mean digging your blog out of a hole.
One you never thought it could get out of.
Why is your content failing?
1. You don’t know your audience.
One of the biggest mistakes is to jump into writing before researching your audience. This entails doing actual research and not assuming.
Do you know the answers to these questions?
What are the pain points for your customers a.k.a. their biggest problems?
What are the demographics (age, location, gender) of your customers?
What are their primary goals?
How can you solve your customers’ problems?
Many content marketers create a buyer persona for their ideal customer. It includes your typical customer’s goals, wants, needs, and even down to smaller details like actual quotes they might say.
The best way to research is to go right to the source. Interact with your customers, do interviews, and ask them if they want to fill out surveys. Or you can begin to create a customer database through forms filled out at purchase.
2. You have no strategy.
If you don’t have a plan, of course you’re going to be disappointed. You won’t know where you’re headed, and you won’t know how to analyze your results.
Still, many businesses don’t have a content marketing plan. Or if they do, it’s not documented. But according to Content Marketing Institute, the top marketers document their strategy.
To begin, determine your goals for each piece of content.
Is it to gather leads? Is it to increase your social media presence? Will it lead directly to sales? Simply having a general goal like “I want this post to make money” for every piece of content you put out will only lead to failure.
Content needs to be tailored to the right audience, and each piece of content must have a clear focus.
Then you can begin to update your content calendar. Enter for each day you publish what type of post it is. For example, informative or transactional.
After you’re done, look at the bigger perspective to see your overall strategy—how many different types of posts you have, where they lead the customer on their buying journey, and what the goals of the posts are.
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3. You’re not doing SEO correctly.
Years ago, writers could get their page ranking #1 on Google easily. All they had to do was spam the keyword they wanted and write tons of blog posts. But Google has gotten smarter.
They’ve updated their search engine rankings so that over 200 factors, based on relevancy, are what determine your ranking.
You can read it straight from Google here.
AI will continue to advance, and Google will only get smarter.
How long a reader views your page, how much they click around before exiting your site, how relevant it is to the type of search they performed, all of these factors play a role in your site ranking.
They’ll even analyze how many shares a piece of content has received on social media.
Which means you need to start writing for your customer in mind, instead of writing in a robotic way (keyword spamming) hoping that search engines will pick it up. Search engines are now incredibly smart and honed in order to determine how engaged your visitors are.
A great place to discover questions your audience is asking is Quora. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are also informative places to understand your target audience’s language.
Understand their most dire questions, then deliver satisfying answers. Google, and your customers will reward you for it.
4. Your site isn’t optimized.
Not only do you need to deliver relevant content, but you need to do it in a pleasing manner.
If your site isn’t optimized, content won’t be easily digestible. Your bounce rate will increase. Your customers will go to the competition. And certain users like those on smartphones or tablets will click away.
Here are some tips to optimize your site:
Break up your writing.
White space, bolding, italicizing, numbers, and bullets break up your content. They create a natural flow that helps readers progress. Make use of headlines with different sizes as well.
Break your content up into sizeable chunks.
Increase your site’s load time.
KISSmetrics found that a one-second increase in loading times can result in a 7% decrease in conversions. You could be draining money if you have a slow site.
Not only will your page bounce rate decrease, but Google rankings favor sites that load faster.
Use a mobile-friendly design.
There are plenty of mobile-responsive designs available, so it shouldn’t be difficult to configure your site for mobile users. After all, 80% of internet searchers use a smartphone.
That number is only going to climb in the coming years.
Deliver results to your audience.
What do these methods have in common? They improve your customer’s experience.
You start by researching your audience – their greatest problems, and then you follow through by delivering satisfying answers. That is the core concept of a winning content strategy.
You must put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You must see the world through their eyes. Then when you put on your business hat, you must respect and understand them when creating content.
It isn’t enough to slap together a few blog posts filled with spammed keywords.
You must go the extra mile and even optimize your site’s loading times. As a business owner, you must strive to deliver on all facets.
If you are ever struggling, just remember that a true, winning content strategy begins with the customer.
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