You have a business blog and you’re publishing content regularly – just like your marketing or SEO advisor, business coach, website designer or digital marketing guru told you to.

Somehow, you formed the impression that doing it would bring in hordes of site visitors, and you concluded that even if a small percentage turned into clients your blog would pay off very nicely.

But it hasn’t. The traffic-busy blog you had in mind is feeling more like a dead end.  What’s gone wrong?

Unfortunately, the advice to set up a blog isn’t always followed up with a detailed explanation of how to get it right.

If you’re going it alone because you don’t yet have the budget to pay a content agency or writing service to take care of the details, what you need to know is that there are a number of important factors that come into play in-between starting a blog and getting results that amount to anything at all.

Here are three common mistakes that seem small but have a big impact.

Failing to choose topics of interest

The entire sales process (particularly for B2B) has been turned on its head in recent years. Your prospective clients are often searching for answers long before they decide to contact a potential supplier. What questions are your prospective clients asking at that stage?

You need to identify those questions and look to publish material that satisfies their queries. You can do that by using a keyword tool and thinking about the things I discuss in my recent article:

MORE: Google Micro-Moments and Long Tail Keywords

You’ll also find a link to a handy keyword tool in that article.

Over and above that, you should consider publishing material that speaks to the aspirations of your prospective clients (rather than their product or service related needs), and allows you to do a little storytelling.

For a more detailed look at these aspects, we’ve blogged about the art and science of business blogging and why brand storytelling defines marketing.

Not grasping the importance of headlines

Consider the way you search online when looking for information on a topic. After searching, you’re presented with a page of search results.

And how do you decide which result sounds the most promising? You read the headline. You might also read the ‘meta description’ that appears below the headline.

The likelihood of people choosing your content over other articles on the same topic hinge on the strength of your headline and your meta description.

The situation is similar when you link to content from your social media channels – if your headline or update doesn’t sound interesting, it’s not going to attract many readers.

If your headlines have nod-off qualities, learn more about  how to write headlines like a copywriter.

Not helping your audience find you

Searching for information is only one of the ways people discover content they’re interested in reading.

Other times they’re noticing interesting content while using social media platforms – whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. Using these platforms (the ones most appropriate for your business) will allow you to build up an audience of people who may see, read, like and share content they find interesting or useful.

By establishing an audience on social channels and promoting your most interesting content, you’re doing a number of important things:

• Increasing your overall audience as people like your Facebook or LinkedIn company page, or follow you on Twitter, for example.
• Opening up an opportunity to spread your content (when people share content it reaches a new audience, potentially expanding your audience).
• The combined effect of the above is increased brand awareness.

The important thing to remember about social channels, is that they exist so you can ‘engage’ with others, and engagement is a two-way thing. If you’re simply publishing your own content and not following others or liking, sharing and commenting on other content, then building an audience will be a slow grind.

However, when you do engage with others, you’re increasing the number of people who notice you and may wish to be part of your audience by following you and reading your content.

I hope some of the information above has been useful. If you’re considering engaging a content marketing service and you’d like to have a chat to our content strategist please feel free to reach out – initial consultations with our strategist are free, and much information can be gleaned during that session! To book a time, simply call me on 1300 880 543.