Tag Archives: blog marketing

Why do most blogs fail and what can you do to avoid that?

Leave a reply

Why do most blogs fail?

This ReadWrite blog post discusses some factors that cause most of the blogs to fail. These factors include

Lack of goals.
Lack of focus.
Unoriginal ideas.
Poor research.
Poor writing.
Irregular updates.
Difficult to discover the blog.
Lack of growth.

Let’s quickly go through these points.

Lack of goals for the blog

What do you want to achieve through your blog? What KPIs have you defined?

By “lack of goals” we don’t mean not knowing what you want to do. If you want to publish a blog to raise ad revenue, then of course you know what you want to achieve.

Similarly, if you want to improve your search engine rankings, even then you know what you want to achieve and what is your goal.

But knowing these alone doesn’t help you much. These are simply outcomes. Higher ad revenue is a byproduct. Higher search engine rankings are a byproduct. What do you actually envisage for your blog?

For example, I want my Credible Content Blog to become one of the known blogs on content writing and copywriting. That is my goal.

I also want to fill my blog with lots of quality content so that other bloggers and publishers have a reason to link to it.

Similarly, what are your blogging goals? Do you want to raise awareness about your technological field? Do you want to establish your authority? Do you want to be recognized as an expert in your field?

These are more definitive goals.

Lack of blogging focus

Every blog succeeds on its niche value.

People want to recognize your blog with a topic or with a field. For example, my Credible Content Blog is known for quality blog posts on content writing and copywriting.

I could have easily gotten mixed up and turned it into a digital marketing blog by publishing posts on search engine marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, landing page optimization, PPC optimization, Mobile app marketing, and such. After all, I do need lots of topic ideas to update my blog regularly.

But I don’t. I stick to content writing and copywriting, and at the most, content marketing.

Even when I talk about something like email marketing and SEO, it is vis-à-vis content writing.

Unoriginal blogging ideas

If you’re writing about something that everybody is writing about, you don’t offer something original. There is nothing to draw people to your blog. You need to stand out. You need to offer something that is not being offered by other bloggers. Something valuable, yet unique.

Poor research

It is important to do good research if you want to establish yourself as an authority blogger. People respect facts and figures that are verifiable and credible. If you are simply interested in throwing around numbers without verifying them and without linking to original, reputed sources, you lose credibility and people stop visiting your blog.

Poor blog writing

Writing is the backbone of your blog.

Unless you publish a visual blog (that has just images and videos), writing doesn’t matter, but if your blog contains lots of writing then make sure that either you are a great, expressive writer or the content writer that you hire is a proficient writer.

If the sentences are muddled, if the paragraphs are disorderly and if the writer doesn’t take much care about the sort of language he or she uses, visitors begin to get put off and then eventually, they stop visiting your blog.

Disinterest begets disinterest. Apathy attracts apathy.

Irregular updates or intermittent blogging

To publish a successful blog, you need to be regular. There needs to be a pattern. You must have a calendar. If you publish a blog with prolonged intervals, people are either going to lose interest or forget about your blog.

You may like to read: Are you blogging regularly? Here is why you should.

If you don’t publish regularly, it means you are not much interested in your blog. Therefore, if you’re not interested, why should anybody else be?

Difficult to discover your blog

Even if you are publishing great content, even if you are publishing content regularly, if people cannot find your blog, all your effort is going waste.

Simply publishing your blog regularly doesn’t prevent your blog from failing. You need to take measures to bring people to your blog.

Pay close attention to your SEO efforts. Establish a presence on social networking websites where you can share your content. Publish a newsletter to broadcast the latest content that you are publishing. Encourage people to link to your blog.

Blog marketing is an integral part of blog publishing.

Repetitiousness

This means publishing the same old stuff repeatedly. Many bloggers do that to improve their search engine rankings. If they think that they publish the same content with little variations, they will cover more keywords.

Your human visitors can obviously make that out because they are smart, but these days, even search engine algorithms can make out that you’re basically publishing the same stuff over and again. Bake fail.

Lack of growth

Growing your blog is a serious business. Take active interest in it. Observe the metrics. Get your blog hooked onto Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Observe the sort of traffic you are attracting and take note of anomalies.

If you think that your blog isn’t getting enough traffic, get to the drawing board again. What are you doing wrong? What sort of content are your publishing and what sort of content you should be publishing? This is an ongoing exercise.

How do you define success and failure of your blog?

I will give you my own example.

My Credible Content Blog doesn’t attract mega-traffic. If I started publishing advertisements, I would hardly make 1-2 dollars every month.

Still, I have been publishing my blog for many years now. Sometimes I go on a hiatus, but as soon as I observe that my traffic is going down, I increase the publishing frequency.

I’m not interested in advertising revenue. Yes, I want to improve my search engine rankings and whenever I increase my publishing frequency, I succeed in that.

My blog brings me visibility. Of late it has also been attracting lots of backlinks, which has improved my search engine rankings further. I don’t actively monitor my backlinks, but I can make out by the number of pings I’m getting in my dashboard.

So, in the conventional sense, my blog is not enough successful, and many may even term it as a failure.

But for me it is a successful blog. It helps me maintain my search engine rankings. It attracts paying clients. It generates work for me.

Define what makes your blog successful or a failure. You might be surprised.

10 Tips to Make Your Blog Popular Abroad

Leave a reply

Making your blog popular abroad

Do you want to market your blog to an international audience? Perhaps you want to offer your products and services to a wider demographic, or maybe you just like the idea of reaching people all over the world.

Here are a few tips to grow your following in other countries.

1. Account for your audience’s time zones when publishing and promoting posts

Research shows that the best time to published a blog post is on a Monday morning. However, “Monday morning” in your country may not be “Monday morning” on another continent.

Use Google analytics and similar tools to identify when your readers are most active, and where they are based. You may need to experiment to find the best local time to release your posts and any accompanying promotional content on social media.

2. Be sensitive to cultural differences

If you write purely from your own perspective without consideration for other views, your international readers will quickly feel alienated. Acknowledge that you are writing as an individual raised in a specific time and place.

For instance, if you were raised in a culture that values hard work for its own sake, do not assume that readers of all cultures will automatically applaud people who put in 60-hour work weeks. Don’t be afraid to question your own values and background from time to time.

3. Show you keep up with global events

When targeting people from a specific country, catch up on the latest news from the area before writing a post and acknowledge it in your post if necessary. For instance, if you are writing a blog on business matters, be sure to talk about key trends and market activities in the country you are targeting.

4. Publish your blog in multiple languages

If you are serious about marketing to an audience that does not speak English, you will need to translate your content. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

You can have multiple versions of the content on the same page, but this could rapidly become overwhelming. It may be a viable option if you only publish very short posts.
A better solution in most cases is to have two copies of your blog hosted on one site, and let visitors view the version of their choice.

If you have a lot of content on your site besides your blog, it may be simpler to set up two websites. You may choose to give each site its own domain name, or set up one version as a sub-domain of the other.

Note that seemingly trivial differences in spelling can make a difference when it comes to readability and SEO. For example, where Americans may use “z,” Brits and Australians often use “s,” as in “realise” or “personalise.” Decide who your main audience is, and tailor the spellings accordingly.

5. Ask yourself, “How can I tailor this marketing strategy to attract an international audience?”

This question should guide your marketing efforts. For example:

If you normally use forum marketing to gain traffic, you will need to create new profiles on forums that cater to your target audience.
If you are a fan of guest posting, you will need to approach new blogs that attract readers from your country of choice.
If you use influencer marketing, you will need to track down new influencers popular with your new audience.

When going after search engine traffic, cater to the search engine most often used by your intended demographic. For example, in China, the most popular search engine is Baidu. You may need to consult an SEO specialist to make sure you make good use of unfamiliar search algorithms.

6. Interview people from different countries

If you are writing about a social issue or hot topic that is receiving a lot of attention in the press, expand your reach and add depth to your blog by interviewing people from several different countries. You don’t have to endorse their opinions, but diverse perspectives will make your work appealing to a broader range of people.

7. If you have traveled, write honest, gracious blogs about your entries

Do you have interesting travel stories to tell? If you’ve explored other countries and your accounts are a good fit for your blog, write posts about your experiences.

Talk about other cultures in a respectful manner. If you have traveled extensively, discuss the lessons you learned along the way. Make your entries useful for anyone else thinking of following in your footsteps. You may inspire someone to start their own adventure.

8. Be careful when making reference to units and currencies

Don’t overlook the little details. For example, some countries use metric units, whereas others favor the imperial system. Offer currency conversions where appropriate.

You can also make reference to the cost of living where necessary. For instance, the price of a house in London is probably much higher, in both relative and absolute terms, than most other places.

9. Review products and services from around the world

If you run a review site, don’t restrict your coverage to products and services available in your country. Do a little background research on which brands are most popular in other parts of the world.

You don’t have to order items from abroad if doing so would be too expensive, but you should at least demonstrate an understanding of what people in other countries buy. You can summarize other online reviews if you cannot write your own first-hand account.

10. Make it explicit that you want to hear or partner with from people in other countries

Finally, ask other people for their opinions and feedback. If you welcome guest posts, ask your readers to pitch ideas for posts pertaining to their experience living in a specific country.

Writing a blog for an international audience isn’t easy. There are practical and cultural considerations to bear in mind. However, if done correctly, you will soon win praise from readers around the globe.

How To Generate A Steady Stream Of Tantalizing Topics For Your Blog

Leave a reply

Business blogs always sound like a great idea, until you run out of interesting things to blog about. We’ve all heard of writer’s block, but “topic block” is another common affliction among bloggers, and it can set in three weeks, three months or three years after launch. Here are a few techniques to help you keep your posts full of information that your audience wants to read, listen to, or view.

Get Help!

Topic block has set in. Now what? One of the most valuable business lessons I ever learned is, when you’ve got a lot of hard work staring you in the face … get somebody else to do it! This technique works like a charm for topic generation. Perhaps the best sources of topics for your blog are your readers, your customers, and your sales and customer service teams — survey these people to get their ideas. This can be done by —

Talking to them in person
Writing a blog post asking for their input
Emailing an online survey
Asking publicly or through private messages on social media

The key to making this work is guiding the responses. Asking an open-ended question such as, “What should I write about?” requires the respondent to do too much thinking. Frame your canvassing efforts with questions that facilitate a useful and specific response. Examples —

What is your biggest business challenge with (product/service/industry)?
What is your biggest operational challenge with (product/service/industry)?
What is your biggest financial challenge with (product/service/industry)?
How has this (product/service) helped you save money?
How has this (product/service) helped you become more efficient?
How has this (product/service) helped you?
What (product/service/industry) issue confuses you?
What do you wish you knew about this (product/service/industry)?

You should include response options if you do an online survey and have some ready if you’re in a live meeting to make it even easier for the respondents.

Look at Keywords

Whether or not you’re worried about SEO for your blog (you probably should be), keywords are an excellent place to mine for blog topics. The keyword data about search terms reveals a lot about what issues are of wide concern, and the language people use to research those issues. Uncovering common issues drives interesting blog posts, and using the popular language in the post title and text attracts blog traffic and holds reader attention.

Online keyword research tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer are easy to use and exceedingly helpful. For instance, if you have a food blog and wanted to write about rice pudding, the Moz tool might lead you to consider one or more of the following topics —

How to Make Rice Pudding
How to Make Rice Pudding From Scratch
How to Make Easy Rice Pudding
Rice Pudding Recipe With Cooked Rice
Baked Rice Pudding Recipe
Simple Recipe for Rice Pudding
Easy, Creamy Rice Pudding
Best Rice Pudding Ever
Rice Pudding With No Egg
Stovetop Rice Pudding

Note that this type of result can translate into multiple posts around the same topic. In this case, a general “How to Make Rice Pudding” post could be followed up with several more specific posts using titles from the list above.

Also, if your company is running a PPC campaign, you absolutely need to review the keyword data. It will tell you what keyword phrases are generating conversions — which tells you what keyword phrases are generating interest. It’s a must-do topic creation chore.

Stop Writing and Start Talking

A final suggestion for topic generation — probably the most enjoyable and for me, the most productive of all — is talking to colleagues and peers. Co-workers, bloggers in your niche or related ones, and maybe even competitors, are just like you, in the sense they are living, breathing and thinking about the same issues day in and day out.

Whether you talk one on one, attend a local meet-up, travel to a convention, use Skype or social media, you will eventually find people who make great brainstorming companions, and topic ideas will flow like a raging river. The nice thing about this topic-generation technique is that it helps not only you, but also your companions. They will develop ideas to help their business and blog, and may lead to guest blogging opportunities and other forms of collaboration that are good for business all the way around.

5 ways to generate more business with guest blogging

Leave a reply

Guest blogging is a great way to generate fresh traffic to your blog and website, provided you make the right moves and you have crossed a certain threshold level. I repeatedly talk about this “certain threshold level” because unless you have crossed it, nobody is going to bother with approaching you for guest blogging opportunities.

Guest blogging has two sides:

You offering guest blogs to other high traffic-blogs
People offering to write for your blog to get exposure for their own website or blog

As rightly mentioned in this Copyblogger blog post on the power of guest blogging and how it frees you from the clutches of search engines like Google, guest blogging can be a double-edged sword. To understand this, you first need to understand

Why do people guest blog and invite guest bloggers?

Why do you want to guest blog on other blogs and why do people want to guest blog on your blog? You can achieve the following by guest blogging:

Get more direct traffic by publishing your blog post on another, high-traffic blog and getting your byline included.
Expose your ideas to a different, wider audience.
As a person or as a brand become known to more people.
Get fresh content for your own blog by letting others write for it.
Get yourself some respite by not having to continuously write yourself and instead, allowing others to generate quality content for your blog.
Increase search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it is the last, 6th reason for which people mostly guest blog and this is how you can become a victim of spamming if you are not careful about for whom you write and from whom you accept content. If you can take care of both these aspects guest blogging is one of the greatest ways of getting access to a wider audience as well as continuously getting new content for your own blog.

How do you generate more business with guest blogging?

Yes, ultimately you want to generate more business. How does guest blogging contribute? Here is how…

You get exposure: If yours is a relatively new business or if you are looking for a bigger audience you can either wait for your search engine rankings to improve and your social media and social networking audience to increase or you can guest blog for more famous blogs. A good thing about guest blogging is, provided you use the right sort of blogs, you can gain massive amount of traffic in no time. How does this help you grow your business? When you are guest blogging you are mostly targeting highly focused, niche blogs, read and viewed by people who are already interested in what you have to offer. Suppose you are in the business of producing biodegradable building materials. Which blogs would you choose? Maybe architecture? Alternative lifestyle? Green living? Regular visitors to these blogs will be more eager to check out your website and become your customers.
You expand your influence as an expert:
Suppose you make a living off advising people how to do a particular thing. For that you need to establish yourself as an expert. You want to be known as an expert in your field. More and more people should know about your expertise so that when they need the expertise that you can provide, they remember that you can provide it. The more you are known as an expert, the better are your prospects.
You get more targeted traffic to your website:
Generating more business from your website and blog is all about getting targeted traffic. Most of the websites face this problem that although they get lots of traffic, they are not attracting the sort of traffic that turns into business. When you are guest blogging you carefully choose the blogs. As I have mentioned in the first bullet, if you are producing biodegradable building materials you will naturally be guest blogging for blogs that attract an audience interested in nature-friendly architecture, green living and pursuing alternative lifestyles. This will send your way lots of targeted traffic and this in turn will improve your conversion rate and hence, generate more business for you.
You get quality content for your own blog: Just as you are providing quality content to other blogs as guest blogger, when you invite other guest bloggers to write for your blog, you are engaging more and more people to generate content for you. As a small business it might be difficult to produce lots of quality content on an ongoing basis over a sustained period of time. But once your blog has crossed a certain threshold level of popularity and traffic, greater number of people will be interested in writing for you. Just imagine, a single person writing one blog post every day and a slew of writers writing multiple blog posts every day. Wouldn’t that be marvellous for your content quantity and quality? The more content you have, the more content is indexed by the search engines, the more content of yours is exposed on social networking websites and the more targeted traffic you have to your blog and website, getting more business to you.
You strike up new business partnerships: It is not just about traffic and exposure when you use guest blogging to generate more business. You can strike up direct business partnerships with people who get involved with you and with people you get involved with. Many of the guest bloggers may turn out to be your customers and clients later on. Similarly you may end up doing business with people you are right now writing for.

Guest blogging is a great networking opportunity because when someone allows you to write blog posts for his or her blog he or she is allowing you to enter his or her space. This is a great opportunity for you to get close to that person in terms of establishing a mutually beneficial business relationship. The same is applied to people who want to guest blog for you.

11 essential ingredients for creating great blog posts

Leave a reply

The objective of every blog post that you write and publish should be to get maximum exposure from your targeted audience, and not just exposure, but also sharing love. Maximum number of people should share your blog post link using their social networking and social media profiles.

There are some key performance indicators (KPI’s) that help you decide whether a blog post that you have published is successful or not. It’s not necessary that you fret over every blog post because there are some blog posts that you publish simply for the heck of the pleasure that you derive out of the process and the sort of interaction you have with your visitors, but if you’re publishing a business blog, then it’s very important that you know exactly what you’re doing on your blog and how you define success. A blog post would be successful if

It creates enough buzz to attract new customers and clients to your website
It makes more people click ads if that’s how you make money off your blog
More people subscribe to your newsletter if that was the intention
It helps you get more search engine traffic for your targeted keywords
It increases your longtail keyword traffic
It gets greater attention on social media and social networking resulting in the outcomes mentioned above

There are some fundamental ingredients that you can use in order to make your blog post successful. 11 such essential ingredients are published in this Copyblogger blog post in the form of an infographic, but below is the bulleted compilation of these ingredients:

Create a killer headline that draws people from search engines and other websites to your website. Your headline should present to your audience the central message of your blog post in a most compelling and attractive manner.
Make a great opening. Your headline should be followed by an impressive opening that prompts people to read further. Otherwise all the advantage gained by the headline will be lost.
Use persuasive words. Such words not just give an adrenaline rush they also instil a sense of purpose in the process of writing as well as reading.
Be authentic. It will help you stand out.
Take every sentence seriously. Write good sentences.
Use bullet points to highlight main points of your blog post.
Divide your blog post under various subheadings giving a clear idea of what awaits.
Use the art of storytelling to keep your readers hooked.
Don’t reveal all your cards at the same time. Withhold your information and keep revealing small bits every couple of paragraphs.
Use attractive images to give more meaning to your blog posts.
Make a convincing conclusion so that people are not left clueless.