Write a blog they said. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website they said.

But you’re not seeing the benefits of writing a blog – yet!

I’m not surprised people give up on their blogs. A successful blog that lights up your website, gets you leads and clients can take a while to hit the ground running, let alone gain traction and start to make an impact.

However, the more mistakes you make with your blog, the longer it may take you to get more traffic to your blog and get the results you want from it.

In this blog, I’ve put together the most common reasons why your blog may be struggling to gain the traction you want, and what you can do to put that right.

Why your blog is struggling to make the traction you want it to

• You’re not creating and publishing the content your audience is looking for
• You don’t have clear objectives for your blog
• Your blog headlines aren’t striking a chord with your audience
• You’re not using your blog as many times as you could
• You’re not putting it where they’re looking for it or where they’d expect it
• You’re not sharing it enough
• You’re not blogging regularly
• You’re not keeping a track on how your blog is performing

How well do you understand your target audience? 

Before you start to create your content for your blog, it’s worth it to spend a little time understanding your target audience and what they’re looking for.

You don’t need to ponder this for too long, when you answer these questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• Who is your ideal client?
• What problems are they facing that you can help solve?

Who is your target audience? Who is your ideal client?

You want to be blogging for YOUR target audience. Not blogging for everyone and anyone.

And within your target audience is your ideal client. 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 selling to so you’re clear on who it is you’re spending your time creating your blogs.

If you’re not sure who you are blogging for, check out my blog where I explain how to identify your ideal client.

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 problems are they facing that you can help solve?

It can be so tempting to decide to work with everyone and anyone but very quickly you can end up working with no-one. It’s seems to be one of those things that’s counter intuitive though, doesn’t it?

Talk to too many and what you say is generic, non-specific and ends up being ignored.

Lost in all of the messages your lovely potential clients are bombarded with every single day in this online world.

When I first started out, I genuinely believed I could work with everyone.  So that’s what I tried to achieve with my marketing.

What happened. Hardly anyone took any notice of me and the ones that did weren’t, I’m sad to say, fab to work with.

Their painful problem is what’s keeping them awake at night, it’s niggling at them, it’s keeping them stuck, it’s a frustration, a worry, a concern, a situation that needs resolved – by YOU!

Imagine if they associated you as the solver of their problem.

If you don’t understand your customer’s problems, how are you going to know what to blog about to help them?

If you’re not sure you’re addressing your client’s pain or problem, all is not lost.

They’re leaving you clues everywhere.  Social media, testimonials, book reviews.

Investigate what your client really is struggling with.

THEN, create your useful and helpful blogs.

Why are you blogging?

Ideally, you want your blogging efforts to support your business objectives and goals.

Without knowing these you won’t know what marketing to create to help you hit them. Instead, you’ll be blogging without any clear purpose.

If you’re not sure what your business objectives and goals are, now might be a good time block out some time to do some business planning. Grab a cuppa if it helps. I always do 😊

What is it you want to achieve? 

Such as:

• How much money you want to earn? By when?
• How many of ‘X’ product or service you want to sell? By when?
• What new products/services do you want to introduce? When?
• What products/services do you want to promote? When?

You can then use your blog to help you achieve these goals by creating your useful and helpful content that solves problems for your audience. In your blog you’ll invite them to sign up for your lead magnet which adds them to your email list.

Use your blog to bring your audience closer to buying from you.

Why your blog headline is important

The first thing your reader will see is your blog headline.

A blog headline needs to leave your reader in no doubt what your blog is about.

The content your audience is searching for is basic content and more advanced content to help them.

Basic content headlines start with:

• Why…
• What is ..

In the title and goes on to answer the question for the reader.

Advanced content headlines start with:

• What is …
• How to…

Let’s say you write useful and helpful content to help parents when it comes to feeding their young children.

Your blog titles, using Why, what is, how to and what to as prompts, could look like these:

• Why are kids so fussy when it comes to eating vegetables?

• What is the best way to cook vegetables for a toddler?

• How to introduce your toddler to vegetables.

• What to do with vegetables so your toddler eats them.

Why are these type of blog headlines a good idea?

It’s how people type the questions they want answered into Google (other search engines are available) so it helps to get your blog found. It also shows your audience that you understand them. Who doesn’t love it when really useful and helpful content appears that matches your search?

Use your blog more than once

There’s no denying that feeling of joy and relief when you hit publish and your blog is now out there.

Job done and time to put the kettle on.

It’s up to the blog to work its magic now.

Not quite.

So many of us put out blogs out and then forget about them and we leave them to gather dust rather than readers.

Why? It could be because it feels like old news to us, we don’t think to re-use it or perhaps it’s something else. No matter what, it’s a shame to leave it sitting there in the dark.

Here’s a few ideas to help you blow the cobwebs of blogs from times gone by and get them out there again. It may be they need an update or a refresh, but if the content is still useful and helpful, use it.

• Share them on social media
• Include links to them in your new blog content. For example, if you talk about a topic and you have a blog that goes into the topic in more depth, include the link to it
• At the end of a new blog, share links to your other blogs
• Share them with your email list

Where is your audience expecting to find your blog?

This can be something as simple as sharing your blog on social media. If that’s where your audience is hanging out, share it where they are.

If they’re looking for useful and helpful content on Linkedin, post about your blog with the link to it, and 7 days later, repurpose your blog as an article on LinkedIn or Medium.

Are you blogging regularly to get traction?

That’s the thing with blogging. You have to be consistent with it if you want a successful blog.

It’s no good writing one blog and then nothing for weeks or months.

It takes commitment. Showing up for your audience regularly, but it does pay off.

Have a plan for creating your useful and helpful content

Once you’ve realised how much you can write about and create for your audience, you’ll need a plan.

• When will you create your content?
• How often will you create it?
• Where will you publish it and share it?
• What else do you need in addition to your content?
• How will you track your results?

When will you create your content?

Block out time for your content creation. For you, a whole day might be best or you might prefer to dedicate some time each day.

How often will you create it?

Create a new blog each week (taking time out for holidays, of course) and you could have 48 pieces of content to share with your audience. Sharing fab content consistently helps you to get better blog results.

Create a new blog each month and you could have 12 pieces of content to share with your audience.

And when you create content around the questions you get asked the most, this content will earn its keep time and time again.

Where will you publish it and share it?

Your website is an obvious choice but what other options are there?

The last thing you want is your content to be used once and then sit there to gather dust.

What you can do is repurpose your key piece of content to create smaller pieces of content that you can publish across a week.

Here’s how you do that.

You’ve written your Blog.

• Take parts of the blog and turn them into individual posts for your social media.
• Turn parts of your Blogs into images for social media.
• You could turn your Blog into an infographic (Canva has some great templates)
• Then you could turn your Blog into a Slideshare
• Republish your Blog on LinkedIn and Medium
• Record yourself reading the Blog for those that like to listen
• Record a video on the topic of your Blog
• Share your Blog with your email list

How is your blog performing?

There’s the saying “What gets measured, gets improved” and you’ll want to apply this to your blog.

If you want more traction you’ll want to know:

• Your starting point: How your blog is performing now
• A few week’s time: How it’s performing now
• What blogs are performing well and what blogs need improving/ditched

There a few ways you can do that.

How will you track your results?

I know leads and clients are what you’re aiming for, but how do you know if you’re on the right track with your useful and helpful content?

How is your website performing?

Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic you’ve had to your website and what pages your visitors have been looking at.

No need to freak out because Google Analytics lays it all out nicely for you with numbers and graphs.

What I’d like you take note of are:

• Users
• Session duration

You’ll find this at the top of your Google Analytics page.

Users

“Users” in Google Analytics is defined as users who have visited your service within a selected amount of days. Good to know this stuff, right?

Session Duration

You want to know how long your visitors are hanging around for.

What pages do your users visit?

Scroll down to the very bottom and you’ll see a section:

What pages do your users visit?

You want to know what pages they’re looking at when they visit so take a note of your:

• Best-performing page on your website
• Worst-performing page on your website

Why do you need to know this stuff?

Let’s say, your best performing page with the most traffic is a sales page for your product or service, but you’re not getting enquiries. Rather than throwing marketing out there in the hope something sticks, you now know people are going to your sales page but you need to do more to help your visitor take that next step to bring them closer.

And the same goes for your worst-performing page. If this is a page, you’re expecting to do well for you, and it isn’t, you need to take action.

What else can you keep check on?

As well as visitors to your website you’ll want to know:

• How is your email list doing?
• How’s engagement going on social media (reach, engagement, likes, comments and shares).

Perhaps there’s other things, like:

• Being invited onto a Podcast or to speak at an event
• Comments on your blogs
• Being asked to write a guest blog
• PR opportunities

What will you gain from tracking your contents performance? 

You’ll know what’s working and what isn’t which is always good to know.

How to keep the traction for your blog going

Have a promotion checklist for your blog.

Some ideas for your checklist are:

• Send email to mailing list
• Send personal email/message to contacts in your network who would find the content useful
• Schedule/share posts that include a link to your blog on social media
• Publish as an article on LinkedIn

Check out these other blogs: 

The biggest problems with blogging and content marketing

What to consider before you start blogging for your business

How to create your 12 months marketing plan to support your business objectives and goals

In Summary:

To get the traction you want from your blog:

• Publish the content your audience is looking for
• Have clear objectives for your blog
• Have blog headlines that are clear and informative for your reader
• Use your blog over and over again – it might be old news to you but it’s new news to your audience
• Put it where they’re looking for it or where they’d expect it
• Blog regularly and consistently
• Keep track on how your blog is performing so you can improve or tweak as you go