If you’re writing blogs as part of your marketing strategy for your business or thinking about starting you’ll want to be sure you’re avoiding the most common blogging mistakes so your blog can play its part in helping you achieve your business goals and objectives.
As well as shining a light on the most common blogging mistakes, I’ll also share with you how you can avoid them and put them right, if you’re making them.
#1. You’re writing blogs your audience doesn’t want to read
Oops!
There’s nothing worse than spending your time and effort writing blogs no-one in your audience wants to read.
It’s so easy to think we know what our audience wants to read and yet so many of us get it so wrong, so you’re not alone.
#2. You don’t have clear goals or objectives for your blogs
In other words, your blog doesn’t really have a clear purpose so it’s struggling to help you achieve your goals or objectives for your business.
The biggest aim of writing blogs for your business is to get leads and clients and yet so many business owners write blogs without knowing what their business goals and objectives are.
Writing blogs and putting them out there without knowing how you want them to help you grow your business is going to be a huge waste of your time.
#3. Your blog titles aren’t striking a chord with your audience
You want to be writing blogs that are useful and helpful to your audience and the headline plays a bit part in drawing them to your blog.
If you’re writing blogs with headlines that aren’t appealing to your audience, they won’t click to read it.
You need to get your blog headline right so it grabs their eyeballs, gets them clicking.
And importantly you want to be sure that when they’ve clicked to read your blog it’s worth their time so be sure to be sharing a blog that’s genuinely useful and helpful to them.
#4. You’re not driving traffic to your blog
No-one wants a blog that’s sitting there gathering dust when it should be gathering readers, leads and clients.
I know it’s a great feeling when you finish writing your blog. There’s a lot of effort that goes into one.
And it’s such a relief when you get it up onto your website. Woohoo!
Does that mean your work here is done?
Nope.
Your blog is a source of useful and helpful content so give your blog a helping hand and get it out there in front of your audience.
Share it on social media.
So many business owners writing blogs miss this trick.
You’ve gone to all that effort to write your blog but you’re not putting it where your audience is hanging out hoping to find the best content, or where they would expect to find it.
Yes the most common place for your blog is your website, but if you’re not currently on page one of Google you’ve got to work a bit smarter to get traffic to your blog.
- Share a post with a link to your blog on social media.
- Share it with your email list.
#5. You’re not sharing it often enough
It’s more than okay to share your blog more than once on social media.
Why?
Well to you it might be old content but there’s always someone your blog will be ideal for.
#6. You’re not blogging regularly
A handful of blogs won’t equal blogging success from your blogging efforts.
If you’re not blogging regularly and consistently it could be time to up your game and commit to writing blogs more often.
You want your audience to know that you share useful and helpful content regularly and consistently with them.
#7. You don’t know how your blogs are doing
Not knowing how your blogs are performing is another common mistake.
Keep track on how your blogs are doing.
This helps you know which blogs are drawing readers to your website, which blogs are helping you attract leads and what topics are relevant and important to your audience.
Knowing what your readers are enjoying – or not – can help you plan what blogs to write.
How do you avoid the most common blogging mistakes of all time?
Let’s take a look at how you can avoid the most common blogging mistakes business owners make.
Know why you’re writing blogs
Whatever you do in your business it should have a purpose and help you to achieve your goals and objectives.
And writing blogs is no different.
Give your blogs a clear purpose so they can play their part in helping you grow your business.
Some examples could be:
- To increase traffic to my website by 60% in the next 12 months.
- To answer my top 10 most frequently asked questions about my product/service so I can reduce the time replying to emails by 35% in the next 8 months.
- To boost my email list from 50 to 200 in 6 months.
They might give you an idea of how to make your business goals and objectives specific for your blogs.
Know who you are writing your blogs for
You want to be blogging for YOUR ideal client. Not blogging for everyone and anyone.
Ideal client is sometimes called Customer Persona, Dream Client or Avatar.
What you call the ideal person you want to sell to is up to you. I’m going to use Ideal Client from here, just so you know. The key thing is that you know who you want to be buying from you so you can be sure you’re writing blogs they’re going to find useful and helpful.
If you’re not sure who you are blogging for, check out my blog where I explain how to identify who your ideal client and target audience is
The truth is, you need to get clear on who it is you want to sell to so your marketing will stand out from all the noise in this online world of ours, and get in front of your potential clients.
What can you do if you’re not sure what problems your potential clients are struggling with?
They’re leaving you clues – everywhere.
A great place is your inbox. What problems are they emailing you about?
It’s highly likely they’re talking about it on social media too.
Amazon is a great place to go nosing around.
Checkout book reviews.
They’re writing about problems they’ve had solved by people that have written books in your industry.
They’re telling YOU what problem they had and what problems they had solved and what a difference that has made for them.
- It pays you to spend time researching what their problems are.
- It really helps you to get inside their heads.
The more of your useful and helpful blogs your potential clients about their problems you increase the chance they may ponder about your products or services.
Be sure you’re writing blogs that answers their questions about your products or services too.
Write a good blog headline
What’s the importance of a good blog headline?
Your blog title is the first thing your reader will see whether they stumble across it on social media whether they find it via a search on Google or if it’s shared with them by a friend in an email.
Your blog headline needs to leave your reader in no doubt what your blog is about.
And to help you write super-duper blog headlines think about what your ideal client will type into a search engine that relates to what they’re struggling with or looking for.
Their searches may begin with the words:
- Why…
- What is..
- How to…
- What to …
Here’s some examples to get you thinking.
Let’s say that you’re writing blogs that are useful and helpful to parents who find meal times a struggle with their little one, especially when it comes to eating vegetables.
You could write blog titles that are a bit like this:
- Why are kids so fussy when it comes to eating vegetables?
- What is the best way to cook vegetables for a fussy toddler?
- How to introduce vegetables to your fussy toddler.
- What to do with vegetables so your toddler eats them?
You now have some ideas on how to write eyeball grabbing blog titles your audience will want to read.
Be consistent at writing blogs by having your plan
You’ve got to be consistent if you want it to be successful at helping you get more leads and clients.
It’s no good writing one blog and then nothing for weeks or months.
Writing your blog takes time and commitment so you can show up for your audience regularly.
Have a plan for writing and sharing your blogs
Once you realise just how much there is to blog about, you’ll need a plan in place.
- What blogs will you write?
- When will you write your blogs?
- How often will you be writing blogs?
- Where will you publish your blogs?
- Where will you share your blogs?
- How many ways will you repurpose your blogs?
- How will you track the performance of your blogs?
Know how your blogs are performing
There’s the saying what gets measured gets improved, and you want to be sure you apply this to your blog.
You’ll want to know how it’s performing.
What you can track
Some things you can track are:
- How many readers your blog is getting via your website?
- How well the call to action on your blog is working for you
- How many leads are you gaining from your blogs?
Wrapping up
There’s no getting around the fact that writing blogs takes time.
And the online world is noisier and busier than ever.
Gaining traction from your blogs also takes time so you’ll want to be sure that the blogs you’re writing for your audience are working for you.
More about how to get better results from writing blogs:
Why is it important you write your business plan before writing blogs?
How to identify your ideal client so your marketing stands out online
How to create your 12 months marketing plan to support your business objectives and goals
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