Happy April Fools' Day, everyone! We're fans of this holiday because occasional (and obviously, harmless!) office pranks fall in line with one of our core values: FUN! But let's be honest: There are certain aspects of a business that should never be an easy target of a joke. We believe that one of those areas is a business' blog.
As a tech savvy business owner in today’s modern age, you likely already know the perks of having a business blog. Blogs drive traffic to your website, help you convert that traffic into leads, drive long term results, and establish your authority as an expert in your field. However, April’s Fool’s Day notwithstanding, you are fooling yourself into thinking your blog is more effective than it presently is if you are making the following, all too common, errors. Read on to discover the top seven reasons that your current business blog might just suck.
1. You Don’t Have a Solid Inbound Marking Strategy
It’s not enough to simply write content for your blog. Instead, you must have a well-orchestrated strategy when it comes to inbound marketing. This means you need to incorporate target personas, keywords and the like to properly appeal to your buyers through each aspect of their purchasing journey. If you are unsure how to proceed or are confused with how inbound marketing works, getting expert help is advised to achieve maximum blogging benefits.
2. You Don’t Measure or Quantify Results
To reach a goal, you first have to set one. After setting one, to know if you are on the right track towards meeting said goal, you need to be able to measure or quantify your results. This is accomplished through traffic analytics, which reveals what content is being viewed most often as well as were your leads are coming from. This information allows you to follow up in a personalized way, giving you a greater chance of converting site views or visitors into customers.
3. You Don’t Promote Your Blog
No matter how great your blog content happens to be, you can't simply sit back and hope someone happens to come across it on their own. Instead, you should be promoting your content via social media, email marketing as well as utilizing other channels such as magazines, radio, and digital targeting.
4. You Don’t Publish Enough
You should publish as much content as possible, always ensuring you don’t sacrifice on your creativity and quality just to post. A great way to guarantee you publish enough is to have a set number of posts that you publish weekly. A HubSpot study found that B2B organizations who posted 16 or more blog entries a month yielded 3.5x more traffic than others who posted four or fewer. In addition, according to statistics, organizations who have blogged over 400 times experienced a dramatic increase in their page views. Therefore, as you can see, it’s important to keep the content coming!
5. You Don’t Show Publish Dates
Some businesses attempt to fool viewers by not revealing a publishing date, thus hoping readers think the content is new. Don’t even try this; it doesn’t fool anyone! In fact, the only thing it does is make it obvious you are trying to hide the fact that you don’t publish regularly.
6. You Don’t Have CTAs
One of the most important elements in any business blog post is a Call-to-Action, or CTA. This element of your content should link readers to forms or visiting pages that will further educate them or take them a step further in the buying funnel. This is a vital step in converting a reader or site viewer into a customer.
7. You Don’t Have Quality Design
Last but certainly not least, you aren’t getting as much as you could out of your business blog if your design is outdated or not easy to navigate. This will result in visitors exiting out of your blog quickly and hinder potential sales.
Even though it’s April Fool’s Day and you might think you have gotten away with it, if you are committing any of the above common errors when it comes to your business blog, you aren’t fooling anyone and your blog isn't operating at its full potential! Need some assistance? Let us help you correct all of the elements listed above and get your blog working for you the way it was intended.
