More people are consuming blog content than ever before. Find out today how to optimize your blog by avoiding the 11 most common mistakes in blog marketing.
According to HubSpot, in 2020, blog marketing is one of the 3 favorite forms of content for digital marketing teams.
Content marketing has been a hot topic for many years and there is no indication that the trend is slowing down.
If you think about it, we’re more likely to watch a video, read a blog post or listen to a podcast rather than click on an ad (not to say you shouldn’t advertise, we obviously recommend it!).
We are also more likely to search for something on Google, read a blog post, get distracted by other content, sign up for a newsletter and finally, after receiving a few emails, buy a product/service.
If you manage to get your visitors to consume as much valuable content as possible, they become more likely to buy from you.
Any business can benefit from content marketing, especially by seeing how easy it is to create a blog on your website.
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract (and retain) an audience’s attention due to the increase in the amount of content being distributed online.
The key to moving forward is to create user-friendly, valuable, informative, inspiring and entertaining content. In short, very engaging content.
If you create concrete strategies and follow proven processes, you have the opportunity to create a profitable audience within the saturated web.
This blog post will address the 11 most common mistakes in blog marketing and how to fix them. It’s time to make the most of your written content.
1- DON’T GET YOUR VISITORS THROUGH THE NEXT STEP IN THE FUNNEL
The worst thing you can do is pour all your blood, sweat and tears (and your money) into blogs and not establish a strategy to take advantage of your efforts. You have impressed the visitor and you must now opt for the sales pitch.
Maybe you haven’t created a thorough marketing funnel, and maybe you don’t know exactly how to maximize the profitability of blog marketing, and that doesn’t matter. However, you need to think carefully about your strategy, especially if your company spends hours and hours creating content.
A simple way to launch your funnel strategy is to start collecting leads with a pop-up, banner or simple form. There are tons of services, such as MailChimp , HelloBar and Klaviyo, among others.
Once you have a prospect’s email, you can continue the relationship from there. If you don’t collect emails, you may never get their attention and never see them return to your website.
If you don’t collect leads, it will be difficult to monetize your blog’s marketing efforts.
2-NOT TO PROVIDE VALUE IN EXCHANGE OF A PROSPECT
You know you have to collect emails, but what if it doesn’t work? What if you receive tons of traffic and no one fills your pop-up windows or subscribes to your newsletter? Your readers will probably never return to your site.
The best way to get someone to subscribe to your mailing list is to give them a valuable gift in exchange for their email address.
Here are some valuable gift ideas:
- Reductions
- Free trials
- Documents
- Ebooks
- Guides
- Tutorials
- Premium passcodes
Everything you can think of as useful to your audience is very valuable and will lead to an email capture which is very important.
The common mistake here is that by having only a subscription box (or pop-up) and no incentive, your audience will not give you their email (which will result in a low conversion rate). You need to offer something irresistible and provide content that will make visitors want to receive more emails from you.
For example, I’ll take The Digital Marketer’s main magnet in which they claim to have generated 35,859 leads in 60 days (see below).
By giving them your email, they would give you the « Facebook ad model library, » which is an irresistible offer for marketers who use Facebook Ads.
They knew that their target audience wanted to improve their advertising results and created an excellent main magnet. It worked.
3-DON’T WRITE USEFUL CONTENT FOR YOUR AUDIENCE
The very idea of being a publisher is to create content that entertains, informs or inspires your target audience. Publishers create attractive material to attract an audience’s attention, then introduce advertisements to make money.
Many companies engaged in blog marketing forget the above point so to succeed in this area, remember that you must first be a publisher first and an advertiser second. Without the attention of an audience, you can’t advertise it! Or at least you won’t have anyone to sell or enjoy.
Suppose you write purely promotional content or content that is no more valuable than other online items. In this case, you won’t get the commitment you need to start capturing leads.
Here’s the key to creating attractive content:
Understand your target audience so deeply that you know its difficulties, weaknesses, challenges, goals, lifestyle, thought process, etc.
You can then create content of their own, answer their questions and solve their problems. If you do that, you create attractive content.
If your company needs help in its content marketing efforts, contact an expert.
4- DON’T USE TITLES THAT GENERATE CLICKS
You spent hours and hours writing the perfect blog post. You have made sure that it is valuable and that you offer a good incentive in exchange for their email. Now let’s talk about the title of your blog post. It cannot be de-riorized.
The title of your blog post is the main element that will help your readers decide whether they will read your content or not. It’s as simple as that.
If you spend eight hours on a blog post, your title should take you a minute to write.
Research viral publications in your niche and analyze their titles. You can even create a spreadsheet with the main titles you find online.
The only thing you need to be careful about is that when you make your title a « click bait, » the following content must provide that value.
Let’s look at some examples of titles for your blog posts (replace what’s in between [hooks]):
- [#] Powerful tips [desired result] (which actually work)
- A step-by-step guide for [desired result]
- The only thing that no [industry] expert will tell you
- The easiest way to get [desired result]
- Common errors in [industry] (and how to fix them)
As you can see, you’ve probably come across titles like this (including this article). You can quickly access other viral publications and create your template.
5-DON’T INTRODUCE CLEAR CTA (CALL TO ACTIONS) ON YOUR BLOG POSTS
If you don’t give advice to your audience and remind them to do a specific action, how will they know what to do?
You may think that by providing valuable content, they could go and check your products or services: Fake.
As for your reader, he reads your blog post to get an answer to a question or learn something. They don’t care about your brand unless they’ve met your content more than once.
You need to let them know that there is more to explore and understand about your business.
As the term describes it, blog marketing is about putting your brand in people’s minds by exposing them to your written content. Make it easier for them by giving them instructions.
You can use the following CTAs:
- Be sure to follow us here! (link to a social network account)
- Share this blog post with other people who might find it interesting!
- Let us know what you think about this in the comments!
- Here’s another related article that might be of interest to you (and a link to it).
- Subscribe to receive more content like this.
- If you liked this article, you might also like this one.
- If you want to learn more about our products and services, click here!
- Here’s how our products/services can help you solve this problem.
- As you can see, there are a ton of examples, and you can have many throughout your blog post. Remember not to be too promotional and stay valuable in your blog post.
As you can see, there are a ton of examples, and you can have many throughout your blog post. Remember not to be too promotional and stay valuable in your blog post.
Finally, don’t be afraid to help them find more great content by creating links to some of your other articles. Make sure it’s related content so it’s worth it for the reader.
In short, clear calls to action are a must in blog marketing.
To show you an example of this tip, here’s Grammarly’s blog post.
Examples of calls to Grammarly’s actions
As you can see above, there is a « Get Grammarly for free » button in the middle of the article.
We also see buttons to share the post on the left, there is more valuable content on the right that readers can view.
All of these options are great calls to action!
6-DO NOT OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
You have no chance in the world of blogs if no one can find your content.
And yes, most of the traffic comes from search engines (social networks too, which I hope you will also benefit from).
Search engine optimization is an industry in itself, and while it will take you some time to learn all the details, you should, at the very least, know the basics.
If you know that this is important but you have not optimized your title, subtitles, meta description and content at all, you are fully committing this error.
Make sure you spend time learning about this topic to improve your blog marketing efforts.
Simply put, if your blog post is not detectable by search engines and properly indexed, no one will find your content.
I have increased the traffic on our blog by more than 300% by better optimizing our writing. To begin with, here is an article where I explain the most critical elements of SEO.
7-DON’T SEARCH KEYWORDS
Avoiding this mistake will save you hours and hours of your time!
If you are new to content marketing, you have no chance of classifying yourself on popular topics as they will be picked up by the big brands that:
Invest more money in content marketing in a week than most companies can in a year,
Have such an incredible reputation and authority that everything they write ranks at the top,
Their blog posts have been over-optimized for some time.
How can these challenges be overcome?
Choose topics for your posts that have decent traffic but not much competition. These may be much less popular topics, but their ranking at the top of search results can give you decent traffic. Plus, it’s better than wasting your time trying to rank highly competitive keywords.
For keyword search, I recommend tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner or ahrefs. These tools can give you an idea of the least competitive keywords or topics and the traffic they generate. Keep in mind that most of these tools are not 100% accurate.
Moz has an excellent guide on how to do keyword search; You can find it here.
If you prefer us to take care of your keyword search and search engine optimization, book a consultation.
8-DON’T PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT
I will use a similar example as above. Let’s say you spent eight hours writing the perfect blog post. It’s perfect in every way. However, you only spent thirty minutes promoting it on your social media accounts.
In case you did not understand the error in this example, let me give you another example.
If you are working on a new product for a year, do you only promote it for one month? That’s not possible. Unfortunately, this often happens with content marketing.
It’s not just about posting it once you’re on your social media accounts. You can do much better! If you spend eight hours writing content, you should spend at least eight hours promoting it.
Here are some ideas on how to promote your blog post:
- Contact other blog editors and ask them to link it to their content (plus, it’s good for your SEO), share it and comment on it.
- Re-publish it several times on your social networks. Don’t overdo it, but nothing wrong with tweeting it from time to time, even years later.
- Enjoy social media groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Send an email to your audience to share your latest article with them.
- Send an email to people who have shared similar content and ask them to share it.
- Put money into Facebook Ads or Google Ads to promote your article.
- Link to your latest blog in some of your other blog posts.
- This list can continue indefinitely. You have to understand that you can’t just publish an article and hope that millions of people will find your content without a little promotion.
9-DON’T BE CONSISTENT WITH YOUR CONTENT
This rule applies to all content marketing tactics and strategies.
You have to be consistent like everything in life, consistency leads to mastery, and on top of that, algorithms like consistency.
Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn and Youtube love consistency, and they’ll reward you for it.
When you become consistent, note how your commitment and reach increase, and when you stop being consistent, look at how it decreases.
Algorithms exist to make you want to publish more and more, so they like to see frequent and consistent messages.
Another reason for being consistent is that if you publish once a week, it is forty-eight articles a year, which will beat anyone who publishes only two articles a year.
Consistency is vital.
10-NOT COLLABORATING WITH OTHERS
Collaboration is one of the most commonly used techniques for YouTube channels.
Content creators know that there is no simpler way to reach a wider audience than to reach someone else’s audience. The most interesting thing is that the benefit is mutual. Both sides win.
When it comes to blog marketing, it’s the same thing. You need to build relationships with industry people and other content creators who talk about similar topics.
These newly built relationships can be translated into collaborations such as creating guest blogs, sharing content on social networks or newslettering each other, connecting with each other and many others.
The virtual world is like everyday business. You need to develop relationships, and whoever can build the best relationships will have a huge advantage over everyone.
11-DON’T REUSE YOUR CONTENT
The best content marketers know this, but if you’ve already put so much thought and effort into a content element, why not transform it and reuse it in other formats?
Let’s say you have a winning blog post that talks about ten ways to tie a tie. Here are some ideas on how you can reuse this content (you can recreate the same content, just with a different format):
- Create a video and post it on YouTube.
- Design an infographic.
- Turn your video into a podcast episode.
- Turn your blog post into a main magnet.
- Share your video on Facebook, Instagram and other video platforms.
- Create a newsletter on the same topic.
- Print a brochure of your infographic and bring it to a conference.
- Share your infographic on Pinterest.
- Create an ebook if the blog post is long enough.
As you can see, there are many ways to use already winning and engaging content in different elements.
Who knows, maybe your YouTube video will go viral and you haven’t spent time researching your subject because you had already done it for your blog post.
Different channels will attract different types of people, and as we talked about earlier, this is just another way to make your content known to as many eyes and ears as possible.
CONCLUSION
If you avoid all these above mistakes, you are on the right track to achieve greatness!
Blog marketing and content marketing for that matter won’t go away anytime soon. So if you’re a company trying to create an audience, that’s the way to do it.
Following these steps will help you create a more engaged audience and a more loyal customer base and a profitable business.
Check out content marketing and SEO services or train in content marketing directly here.
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This article first appeared on Noetic Marketer.
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