As an entrepreneur, it can be tempting to jump into blogging as a way to reach your audience and generate new business. After all, companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites. But, before you start there are a few mistakes entrepreneurs make when blogging that you need to avoid. Here are five things that can hinder your progress and keep your blog from the traffic that it deserves.
Company milestones and feature updates are easy to write about. It feels good to write them, and even better to read them. But, do your customers and leads feel the same way?
The truth is that “company/product update” type posts are rarely valuable to the audience you hope to attract. And that’s a problem because as a blog, the objective is to give back to the audience.
So before writing any blog post, think about which topics would give value back to the reader. What would they want to come away from your blog with? That's what the posts should be about.
Once you understand that you need to help your audience, the next question is, who is the audience? After all, if your blog doesn't have a well-defined audience, you have no idea how to write for them. Coming up with blog post topics, the right tone, and even what vocabulary to use all depend on knowing who the readers will be.
Take the time to define who your target demographic is. To start, consider the overall outcome that you want from writing a business blog. What can you achieve if your message gets to the right audience? Then consider, who is that audience? Once you know who you want to reach, you will be in a better position to write something that your audience will value.
It's always difficult to get into someone else's head to understand what they want, but it’s the fastest way to a popular blog post. Luckily, there are many modern ways to help make this process easier.
One of the best ways is to use search engine data to find what kinds of information your audience is looking for. Using a content optimization tool like Topic, you can quickly find the key concepts around any subject that you need to cover.
In a similar vein, using the People Also Ask box in Google is also a great way to identify questions your audience is asking. By doing the necessary research to understand what your audience wants to read you can ensure that your post is adding value.
Even after hitting “publish” on your post, there’s still work to be done.
Many bloggers assume that if they have the right keywords in the text, the search traffic will follow. However, it takes a lot more than that to get traction.
Consider all of the marketing channels that you can leverage. Even if you are starting from scratch, you can lean on your existing network to promote a piece of content. Email, social, and paid channels all offer opportunities to attract attention.
This technical mistake is one that is easier to avoid in the beginning than it is to fix it later. Putting the company blog on a subdomain cuts the domain authority of your site in half.
Because Google sees subdomains as being entirely different sites, the site and its blog won't help each other in terms of traffic or ranking. This can make an enormous difference, especially in the beginning when every backlink counts.
If you avoid these mistakes entrepreneurs make when blogging, it will help you to create and market blog posts that resonate with the reader and leave them wanting to read more.
Interested in learning more? Read this post to learn more about how to create great content.
