Creating a successful marketing blog isn’t easy. It certainly isn’t as simple as a lot of marketers make it sound. Perhaps that’s why so many business owners come to us after posting a handful of articles to their website without getting any visits or page views, much less new leads or sales.
Usually, we discover that they’ve made two major mistakes. The first is failing to recognize how blogs work as marketing tools. And second, they don’t pay attention to the right parts of the process.
In our two-part series, we’re going to help you avoid making the same mistakes. Let’s begin by looking at an overview of the blog marketing process that seems obvious after things are working…
How to Turn Blog Posts Into New Sales and Revenue
If you want to actually profit from your blog, there are essentially two steps you have to follow. The first is to not just post material to your site, but to have articles that draw in lots of viewers. After all, the whole point of having a blog (at least from a sales standpoint) is to attract customers. You can’t do that unless people are visiting your website.
The first step is something most marketers understand, even if they don’t do a great job of attracting readers. But, simply getting those readers isn’t enough. In order for your blog to be useful to your business, you also need conversions. These can be sales, email subscriptions, walk-in leads, or even callers who set appointments with your sales team.
The point is that without those conversions, your blog content is wasted. And of course, you can’t generate those conversions until you have visits and readers in the first place.
How to Make Your Blog More Visible
- Ten years ago, you could post keyword-filled content to your blog and count on Google to bring traffic to your website. Now, though, tens of thousands of marketers are in on the act, so you have to work harder to attract those visitors.
- How do you get people to take notice of your articles and visit your website? Here are a few easy tips we share with our clients…
- Use magazine-style titles (7 Steps for This, What You Can’t Afford to Forget About That, etc.) that feed on a reader’s curiosity.
- Accompany each post with a feature photo or image that grabs attention and builds interest in the subject matter.
- Write meta descriptions that stand out in search engine results and make interested prospects want to read your posts.
- Research and include plenty of targeted search terms that make it easy for the right audience to find your articles on Google and Bing.
- Include internal links within your articles, both for the sake of search engine optimization and to encourage readers to click from one piece to another.
- Consider promoting your blog posts through search engine and social media ads that are tightly targeted towards your most important buyer groups.
Blogging is About More Than Visibility
Each of the tips above is important, and they can all help you to increase the readership of your blog. However, as we’ve already mentioned, it’s not enough to simply get readers coming to your website. If you really want a marketing tool (instead of an outlet for your creative energies), you have to have conversions.
In part two of this series, we are going to give you some simple and practical tips you can use to turn your blog into a conversion machine. So, if you want to know how to generate leads, sales, and inquiries from every post you put online, check out the second installment!