Why Do Blogs FAIL? 45% of marketers selected blogs as their most important content followed by visual assets at 34% and videos at 19%

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Branden Hensley
5 years ago
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1 Why Do Blogs FAIL? 45% of marketers selected blogs as their most important content followed by visual assets at 34% and videos at 19%

2 Why Do Blogs Fail? According to a report released by the social media examiner, 45% of marketers selected blogs as their most important content followed by visual assets at 34% and videos at 19%. Sadly, some of these blogs fail. Why is that so? Here are 7 reasons why this happens: Reason 1: You Create Too Much Content Would you rather produce an article every two days and spend the rest of the time promoting it or fill your blog with too much content and hope that you will have 100% readership and all your readers will faithfully and vigorously share your posts with their friends? Instead of having too much content, promote the few posts you have. While you do this, ensure that you promote in different platforms to widen your reach. Reason 2: You Perceive Blogging As A Hobby And Not A Job What is the difference between a hobby and a job? In my opinion, you do a hobby just to pass time and relax while you expect results from a job. Right? A person who takes blogging seriously will go a step further and analyze the metrics -know and understand the trends and be able to predict future trends and interpret what the trends mean for the business. Such a business minded person is better off at driving their blog to the right direction and eventually running a successful blog. To track your metrics, try using the metrics tool in your publishing platform. For example, the WordPress social metrics tracker. Page 1

3 Reason 3: You Ignore SEO By now, as a content developer or marketer, you ought to know that content and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) go hand in hand. 3 SEO benefits of blogging One: Content Variety Two: Link Bait Three: More Indexed Pages A Few SEO Mistakes 1. You Don t Have Your Own Domain And Hosting 2. You Plagiarize Content 3. You Buy Backlinks Reason 4: You Don t Have Market Knowledge Do you have the right knowledge? Do you know how blogs are run? Do you even know how to use simple strategies such as influencer outreach? Did you know that producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers has been rated as the biggest content marketing challenge? Fear not: Here are a few tips: Brainstorm your ideas and topics. You can do this in a team of 8 to 13 persons or trust your individual judgment. Secondly, think like your customers or audience and understand their pain points. Do your research and address these pain points using the best Page 2

4 knowledge you can get. If you can t do this on your own, it does not hurt to invite a guest blogger to do it for you. You also need to do ample keyword research that will help you rank high in search engines. Additionally, you will get to know how your client s describe their pain points using long-tail keywords and tweak this information to suit your blog. Lastly, use well researched and optimized headlines that will attract traffic. While you are at it, remember that you should make sure that the quality of content offered is commensurate with the quality headline. Reason 5: You Lack Personality Showing your personality on your blog helps readers to better connect with you. There are different ways of doing this: You can start with a personal anecdote which will help you better connect with your readers. Alternatively, reference movies, book or music you like to make the reader feel like he knows you. You can also use a conversational tone to sound like you are directly speaking to your audience. Reason 6: You Ignore The Power Of A Story While it is good to sound serious and jump right to the gist of the blog when writing, it has been proven that telling a story before you get to the serious part works better. Your audience is better placed to connect with you. This does not mean that you ignore the value of the post. In actual sense, telling a story is about delivering valuable information in a manner that your audience wants you to. Page 3

5 Here is how to do it: 5 Easy Ways Of Telling A Story In Your Blog Post One: Lead With Dialogue Sometimes, what we write is usually set on the backdrop of an earlier conversation we had with an expert or colleague. Or even a question that a reader asked in your blog s comment section. Such talks leave us with questions whose answers translate into a blog. So, why not start your blog on that note? Two: Tap Into A Story Your Readers Already Know Reading books and watching movies are probably in the list of hobbies for many people. Why not use this to your advantage to pull more people to your blog and make them read it? Three: Come Up With Something Get creative and give an enticing and engaging fictional story. Four: Include Images In Your Post Here is why: They are visually appealing, they help you grab image search engine traffic especially when your images are optimized for SEO, you will get more social media share and images give your post the illusion of length. Five: Use Emotion To Your Advantage Research has showed that readers connect best to stories that relate to senses. This means that you can use emotion to create a connection between you and your audience. Page 4

6 Reason 7: You Focus on Traffic Instead Of Readability Having a great social media presence is the target of almost every business. While we all strive to make it big on social media, we forget one thing- how to get people to actually read your content. Do you know that people skip what they deem unimportant and skim through the content until they see something interesting? In fact, 55% of online readers spend less than 15 seconds on a page. Here is what you need to do to improve readability on your blog: Focus on the introduction. Introductions matter in the sense that the moment they bore your audience, they opt out. Write proper headlines that tell your readers what your content is about. Fact is, people are skimming. So, to keep them on your page longer, you need to write clear headlines and sub headlines that will attract them to other parts in your post. Page 5

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