To be completely honest, most people go into blogging with this mentality:
Step 1: Publish a blog
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit
Most people who are already blogging successfully take the real strategy and process for granted. But, if you’re new to blogging, or not generating the leads you’re expecting yet, it’s crucial to connect the dots from your blog content to your follow-up, and then to your product.
The right strategy and process are totally achievable:
Step 1: First, alleviate the pain point by addressing it in your blog.
Blogging isn’t about just creating content. The content must be helpful to an audience that will potentially be interested in your company and product. Identify the reader’s pain point that brought them to your blog, then alleviate it.
If your blog is the initial contact with a consumer, it should be educational, not focused on your brand or product.
This works in two ways. One, the consumer now associates your company with solutions in a certain field. In addition, you can foster a continuing trusted advisor status with your audience. Now that the relationship has been built, trust will continue to grow with consistency.
Step 2: Publish all material with a call to action at the end that makes sense for your content.
Does your blog end with any suggestion of the next step through a form or call to action button? Does the next step make sense based on what the audience just read?
After first contact, the call to action should not lead directly to your product, as the leap is very large. Continue connecting each dot between your blog and your product.
If your blog was about how to choose a great horse before you buy one, then a great call to action would be a button that asks readers to fill out a form to send them regular emails about updates in the equine industry. Simply adjust this concept for your particular audience and industry.
Step 3: Only after you grow trust, call for your audience to make direct contact with your company or product.
This stage is where the reader becomes an actual lead. They have read your blogs and know who you and your brand are because of your follow-up, so it is easy for them to consider your products worthy.
- You have already given them free education.
- You know what solves their problems, regardless of whether you are selling something.
- You have kept the relationship growing with your calls to action.
Don’t back away at this point. Identify the problem or opportunity you know your audience is facing, and call for them to make contact. Get them on the phone with a representative, or finally show them your product.
But my blog isn’t even being looked at!
So you have a process in place, but you don’t have any readers. Here are the most common problems:
You’re not promoting the blogs through social media and other websites or advertising.
While search engines will draw potential readers to your content, you should definitely kickstart the process by drawing attention from people that might be interested. Link your blog post through Twitter, and tag other key influencers in your industry that may be interested in seeing and sharing the content.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest all draw readers that may choose to link to your content from other websites. This draws you a principal readership, but also may increase your search engine traffic as well! Search engines analyze the number of links to your page from outside websites, as well as how much traffic your page is generating.
You haven’t given the blogs enough time to start generating leads.
There’s a turnover time for blogs to generate leads. Make sure that you continue to promote and monitor your blogs after the initial publication. What you will see is how long it takes before your audience becomes familiar with your content.
Keep sharing the same posts. Maybe your ideal audience won’t open the link and read the blog on first exposure, or maybe even the second. What matters most is that you eventually get the desired effect.
Don’t just abandon the promotion and monitoring because you don’t see instant performance. Even though you should continue to develop new content, keep using the content you already have.
Your blog lacks the essential “best practices” that make a blog useful.
Let’s start with the bad news: you can have the best strategy, great promotion, but floundering content, and you still won’t generate leads.
The good news is this: you can fix a broken blog and start getting the results you want.
Make sure your content style matches the type of person that would be reading your blog. If you’re writing an educational blog for someone who is interested in buying their first horse, you would probably have to avoid using technical language without explaining it first.
You don’t have to rewrite a failing blog from scratch. Start by going back to make sure that you used the clearest grammar and spelling, that the format is readable, and that you included helpful images and links.
Once you have the blog polished up and ready for your readers, go back to promoting and monitoring.
Try to enjoy the blogging, strategizing, and promoting, because the process never ends!
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