3 Reasons Why Your Blog Sucks Successful blogging isn't rocket science.
By Jason Parks •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When you work with hundreds of different brands like I have done over the years, you notice a common theme among all the different business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers. One of the most glaring issues I see on a daily basis is that every businessman or woman who I speak to emphasizes the importance of their company blog. Yet most of the time, their blog sucks! It doesn't generate any revenue or traffic for their business, and there is no game plan or organization behind the blog.
I apologize in advance for my bluntness here. I just feel businesses can excel with their blog if they post content consistently, focus on distribution and find other websites to write content for, which most do not. Back in the good old days, before blogging was at our disposal, if you wanted a write-up on your company, you'd have to contact the local paper and pray it would run a feature piece on your business. Your business can now blog and share all of the great stories taking place at your business. So why aren't you?
Related: How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online
There are some brands that contact my agency that have hit a home run with their blog strategy. This isn't the case for the vast majority of inquires we receive, however, which is why I'm bringing this issue to light.
Here are three reasons why your blog sucks:
Lack of frequency
The issue:
This one speaks for itself -- you simply aren't posting enough content.
How to fix it:
Determine whether a daily, weekly or monthly schedule is best for your business. Frequency is just a small piece of the pie. You need to make sure the content is amazing. If you are posting daily and the content is lackluster, you are better off posting less frequently and focusing on improving the content. If you are a blogger or are managing a blog, think of yourself like a newspaper journalist. Can you churn out enough content for a daily newspaper article? If not, you are likely better suited for a weekly column in the Sunday paper. Find your sweet spot in terms of frequency and then move onto item number two, distribution!
Related: 10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks to Your Website
Lack of distribution
The issue:
This is one of the most overlooked components of blogging. I've worked with plenty of brands who have written great content but when I'd look at Google Analytics, I'd see that there were only 50 visitors to their amazing blog post. If you are going to spend the time to write a great piece of content, please do me a favor and make sure people actually read the blog.
How to fix it:
Facebook is the best platform, in my opinion, for promoting your blog. You can run a "link click" advertising campaign on Facebook so you are only charged when someone clicks on your article. This makes a big difference, as you are not going to get charged if someone "likes" your post or views your post, you'll only be charged if someone actually clicks through to your blog.
Related: 4 Golden Rules to Boost Blog-Post Engagement
Real life example:
We just created a blog post, "Tips to Throw the Best Ugly Christmas Sweater Party," for an ecommerce company that makes ugly Christmas sweaters. We already created an advertising campaign targeting this piece of creative to 21- to 34-year-olds who have an interest in "partying" and certain alcohol brands and musicians. Based off of prior metrics, we expect this blog post to get over 1,000 visits and it will only cost $50, or $.05 per website visit. The beauty of this strategy is that if you have retargeting set up on your website and properly set up your Facebook advertising, people who visit your blog page will be exposed to your retargeting ads, which can turn an informative piece of content into a powerful campaign to generate sales.
If you are creating at least one blog post per week, you should be driving a minimum of 250 visitors to your site per blog post to make the time investment in creating the piece worthwhile.
Lack of strategy
If you are unfamiliar with domain authority, it is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. To make a long story short, to increase domain authority, you need quality backlinks pointing back to your site from external websites.
The issue:
Too often, I see businesses only focusing on internal blog content, which means they are only posting blogs to their own website. If you boost Facebook posts to drive more website traffic to your blog but aren't seeing sales from this, it is time to shift your strategy.
Related: How to Write the Perfect Business Blog Post
How to fix it:
I'm not recommending giving up on internal blogs, but you should also focus on external blogs. When I say external blogs, I mean blog posts contributed to other industry related websites or local websites that are relevant to your business.
When you write external content, this can help bolster your domain authority. The more credible backlinks there are that point to your site, the more it will help increase your website's credibility in the eyes of Google. When you write for other sites, the webmaster will often let you include a link back to your site in the bio so others can learn more about you and your business. Over time, these backlinks will bolster your domain authority, which in turn will help with your SEO. Once your domain authority is boosted, more people will be able to find your blogs when searching on Google since your site is viewed as authoritative. If you just build a website and launch it, it is very unlikely that someone will immediately find your blog content since there are already other sites that are more established and credible compared to yours.
Related: A Quick Guide to Starting a Money-Generating Blog
Real life example:
For our agency, The Media Captain, our focus has been heavy on external blog content. I would actually grade our internal blog as mediocre at best. The reason why I've put more emphasis on the external content is to generate more referral traffic and bolster our domain authority, which we have accomplished. We are in the process of rolling out a strategy now to create a weekly piece of digital marketing content for our own blog. Since this is very time consuming, we wanted to make sure before tackling this endeavor that our domain authority was at a level where people would be able to find our blog via Google's search results.
Successful blogging isn't rocket science. I'm confident that after reading this article, you will have that "a-ha" moment where you pinpoint the issue with your blog and figure out the best strategy to generate more traffic, leads and ultimately sales.
