On your business’s website, what is the main thing that you need to have to create organic traffic?
You need a blog that has great content.
The problem that I’ve been finding often is that most blogs don’t have great content.
This is quite alarming because a blog is an essential piece within your content marketing strategy.
Blogging gives you the opportunity to communicate your knowledge and expertise, while highlighting your business’s value to your target customer.
If your website doesn’t have a blog or your blog’s content is awful then your ability to generate traffic or convert traffic into customers is almost impossible.
Today’s customers are very savvy and like to do a lot of research before making a purchase.
The content you have on your blog provides them with insight about how your product or service can solve their problems.
If your content is both educational and engaging, it makes it easier for the conversion process to take place.
But if your blog is nothing more than a sales pitch, it’ll only annoy people and they’ll leave immediately without initiating any engagement.
Most businesses don’t know how to create blog content that is 90% educational and 10% sales.
Focusing on educating your audience highlights the call to action you implement within your blog post to initiate the sales process.
Your blog is supposed to nurture the relationship with your audience by creating familiarity and establishing your authority.
Once these two criteria have been developed, you can sell more of your products and services when you promote them within your blog posts.
This is why you need to learn how to make your blog more attractive to your target audience.
Once you know how to do this, you’ll create more engaging content that increases your conversion rates.
Let me show you how this is done.
Focus on a Niche
My problem when I first started my entrepreneurship blog was that I created content without a specific focus.
Whatever came to my mind within the realm of entrepreneurship is what I wrote about.
This may work for a website like Entrepreneur but not for a small blog that hasn’t established an audience.
Without having specific keywords and topics that I wrote blog post around, I was attracting readers who weren’t really within my target audience.
One post would be about leadership, the next about sales, the other about the problems within the job market, and even about the failures of the public education system.
Writing in such broad terms made it hard for Google to promote my blog to the write audience when they searched for specific keywords because it couldn’t decipher the focus of my content.
This is why SEO is still very important for blogs.
Once I realized this fact, I began to shift the focus of my blog content to online business, online marketing, online sales, and building online authority.
I still have to go back and delete all of my old blog posts or repurpose them to fit within the niche I have chosen to focus on.
You need to choose a niche for your blog and only write content that fits within it.
This helps you attract the right audience to your blog who become loyal followers.
You want people coming to your blog who truly enjoy your content.
They stay on your blog longer reading more content, instead of leaving only after a minute because your blog isn’t what they expected when they clicked on the headline of your blog post.
If you choose to write about sales, focus on an industry or a specific aspect of selling.
If you choose to write about small business, focus on how to build a small business or how to scale a small business.
It may seem like you’re losing out on capturing bigger pieces of the market when doing this but you’re not if you play it smart.
Once you build up your audience within your initial niche and exhaust all the content you can out of it, you can then expand the focus of your content while having a loyal audience already in place.
Explain your reason for broadening your content to your audience before making a shift so that they can anticipate the new transition.
Focus on a specific niche, create as much content as you can around it, build a loyal audience, strengthen your search engine rankings based on your keywords focus, and then slightly broaden your content’s focus.
Educate Your Audience
In every blog post written on this website, you’re going to see me preaching about educating your audience.
This is a must if you want to build a successful blog that achieves your goal in creating more customers for your business.
Therefore, your blog needs to focus on the pain points that your target customer is dealing with.
As a business that provides solutions to their problems, you should know these issues like the back of your hand and how to resolve them.
It might seem like a disservice to your business to provide solutions to your customer’s problems for free but you’re sorely mistaken if you have this mindset.
Just because your customers want to find the solutions to the problems they’re dealing with, it doesn’t mean they want to implement the solutions themselves or that they even have the time to do so.
What they really want to find is an expert who they can trust.
Trust is earned by demonstrating your knowledge.
For example, I operate a content marketing agency.
My blog post teach my audience how to create better blog posts, how to write an e-book, how to create an effective content marketing strategy, how to write irresistible cold emails, and so forth.
Readers of this blog are more than welcome to take the knowledge I provide and do all these things themselves. I welcome them to do that.
But my core audience is entrepreneurs and businesses that are too busy to create their own content.
They would much rather pay for these services to be done for them so that they can generate more leads and customers for their business.
So while I’m educating my audience about how to become better at content marketing, I’m highlighting my knowledge, and positioning my company as a potential provider for their content marketing needs.
You must do the same thing when writing content for your blog.
Educating your audience positions you as an authority.
Authority status means that you are viewed as better than the average provider that offers similar products or services as your business.
I know you want to primarily focus on selling your products and services via your blog posts but having educational blog content will help your business in the long-run.
Just be patient and focus on educating your audience.
I guarantee you that it will pay off exponentially if you remain consistent.
Update Your Blog Consistently
I mentioned creating familiarity earlier in this post.
The only way you do this is by updating your blog consistently with new content.
One great blog post might get you some feedback and a little traffic but what happens after that?
You need to keep pushing out content on a consistent basis to keep your audience’s attention and to show up on Google’s radar.
Both of these things need to occur if you’re going to build your authority and convert your audience into customers.
Consistency shows that you have deep knowledge about your industry and that you’re committed to educating your audience.
Let’s say that you create 20 great blog posts in two months instead of ten months.
Being so consistent in two months will quickly build up your SEO rankings on Google which creates a steady stream of traffic coming to your blog.
Within ten months you can be positioned as an authority in your industry with this type of consistency.
But 20 great blog posts within ten months will do nothing for your blog’s growth.
Sure, you may have some great content but it can’t be found easily because you’re too inconsistent.
I’m telling you, it’ll pay off in the long-run if you update your blog consistently.
A year from now you’ll be generating a lot of leads through your blog posts because you positioned it to do so by being consistent.
Offer Freebies via a Call to Action
So free content via blog posts isn’t enough?
Well, not exactly.
There’s this thing called a call to action that is intended to create engagement with your audience beyond your blog.
When creating a CTA, your goal is to have an individual enter their email address in exchange for your free offer.
This allows you to communicate with them via email, with their permission, which gives you the opportunity to nurture them towards buying your products or services.
A freebie includes: an e-book, webinar, guide, or some sort of template that can easily be used for their business.
Your freebie needs to be valuable.
When you offer value for free, it provides incentive for that individual to become a customer because they recognize the quality you put into something they’re not even paying for.
So they become intrigued about how in-depth your content that has to be paid for is.
Plus, you need those email addresses to actually generate a consistent revenue stream(s) via your blog.
Speaking of freebies, have you downloaded your copy of Creating Content that Sells.
This e-book will teach you how to create content that actually engages your audience and how to nurture the relationship so they can be converted into customers.
I highly recommend you download it today if you haven’t already done so.
Conclusion
You definitely need to implement the information provided in this blog post if you want to build a blog that produces results.
Don’t have the blog that has horrible content, is barely updated , and provides no value to your target audience.
The purpose of having a blog is to create awareness about your business, build your authority, and generate quality leads for your business.
You can’t do any of these things with a terrible blog.
So I suggest you take your blog serious if you want to produce serious results.
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