So, you have a blog for your business. Every forward-thinking small business owner knows how blogging can be a great marketing tool. It is a vehicle that allows you to easily connect with your customers on a massive scale.
In fact, statistics have shown that having a blog can drive sales by a significant number. According to this report from Hubspot, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors than companies that don’t blog.
The same report also shows that B2C (business to consumer) companies that blog generate 88% more leads monthly. B2B (business to business) companies that blog generate 67% more leads as opposed to companies that don’t blog.
But if you have a blog and you aren’t seeing your success mirroring the statistics, then something’s clearly wrong.
Have you asked yourself why your blog isn’t attracting more customers?
Are you just beginning to realize that just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that your business will automatically take off?
The truth is that having a blog isn’t enough. You still need to do a bit of planning to turn your blog into a sales generation tool.
Are you ready to craft your blog into a venue that actually leads to sales? If so, let’s explore the possible reasons why it isn’t performing as you think it should.
Here are the top three things to ask:
1. Are you creating the kind of content that grabs the attention of potential leads?
Just updating your blog with any kind of content is not going to attract those customers and make a sale. You have to capture their attention, sustain their interest, engage them in ways that only you can, and keep them coming back for more. How do you do this?
Get inside your customer’s head. Talk about the kind of things that they would be interested in. You can do this by doing a bit of market research. It doesn’t have to be complicated - just send out informal surveys, ask your target customers some questions on Facebook. Then, read their answers carefully. This only takes a few minutes, and it ensures that you are on the right track with your blog content before you even write anything.
Establish your authority on topics that are relevant to your product. Write well. Use statistics when you can. Make sure the data is accurate.
Have an opinion when writing your blog posts. Make sure this opinion reflects your brand. This will encourage interaction among your readers, and can attract more visitors who find that your opinions resonate with theirs.
2. Are you directing your blog readers into your sales funnel?
The above 3 tips can help strengthen your readership, but you will need to do more to retain it.
Your regular blog readers can now be considered your “leads”. You have a group of people already interested in what your company has to offer. Now, how do you convert these leads into paying customers? Here are a few ways to do this:
Set up your blog so that traffic from there is driven to an appropriate landing page. This way, any random blog visitor searching the internet for information relevant to your product can have an easy go-to page when they want to learn more.
This is a one-pager that should contain an introduction to your product, testimonials, and product features. Direct your readers to this landing page.
The results may also be better if you create specific landing pages for each main issue or category that you discuss in your blog. Copyblogger does this well with their individual landing pages on copywriting, keyword research, and other online marketing topics.
At the end of your landing pages, ask your readers to opt-in to your mailing list. This will allow you to bring in interested blog readers into your sales funnel. Through the mailing list, you can send them more information which can lead them to buy your products.
If you don’t direct your readers into a sales funnel like this, then you are wasting almost all of the effort you put into producing content for your blog.
Remember that the content you’re creating has a purpose - to get you more leads and sales - if you don’t focus on that then you are just producing more information for information’s sake.
3. Do you actively promote your blog? Or are you treating it like a secondary feature of your website?
It would be a pity to spend all this time improving your blog and then not promoting it. But this is exactly what some people are doing. It doesn’t matter if you upload a blog post everyday, you will not get results if no one is there to read it.
Here are a few ways to avoid this common mistake and get your blog out there for the potential customers to see:
Use the right social media channel to push your content. If you find that many of your blog readers and customers are coming from Twitter, then get active on Twitter. If they are coming from Facebook instead, then set up your Facebook page. Find out the social channels that your target customers are using, and use that to bring in more new readers to your blog.
Spend a few minutes a day responding to your readers and commenting on other relevant blogs and forums. Be an active participant. Don’t forget to link back to your blog when you do this.
Email key influencers who have blogs or social media accounts followed by your target audience. Just reach out to these influencers. You don’t have to sell them into the idea of promoting your blog at first, build a real relationship first and they will promote your blog and business naturally.
It’s time to stop treating your blog as an outlet for ideas, and start treating it like the business generation machine that it could be. Follow these simple, practical fixes and recreate your ordinary blog into a great marketing tool that attracts leads, engages them, and turns them into paying customers.
Rita is a marketer at London based web design agency Activate Media. Connect with Rita on Twitter @ritaauta and Google+. You can sign up here for a free 5-part course on how businesses can really get more sales and leads online.
