Blog Intervention

We’re here because we care about you. Really, we do. Wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. But we need to talk. It’s about your blog.

It kind of sucks.

We know you’re trying! No one sets out to have a crappy blog. But somewhere along the way, these things can happen, even to good, hardworking people like you. Let’s start by admitting there’s a problem. Your blog is probably guilty of these things:

1. You haven’t updated since the Bush administration.

Regularly updating your blog takes time, and we could all use more of that. It also takes dedication and making the blog a real priority. That can be hard to do when you’re a busy small business owner. You miss one blog post on your carefully constructed content calendar, which turns into two missed blogs which turns into the sad, forgotten content you’ve got now. When your site’s abandoned or only updated once in a blue moon, people stop coming around to hear what you’ve got to say. Eventually search engines might, too. It also hurts your credibility to see an abandoned blog with out-of-date information. Oh, and for the record? Those “we’re back and turning over a new leaf” blog posts almost always result in failure. If you do come back with revitalized strength, don’t brag about it. Just go about your business.

2. Your content is thinner than off-brand Kleenex.

You meant well. But somewhere along the way, your content stopped being useful and began offering up the same old rote, regurgitated stuff everyone else is churning out. It stopped being you and became a cold, calculating exercise in search engine optimization, every word feverishly researched for its maximum SEO benefit. The result? Content Google (and your prospects) see right through. You’ve got to try harder to create content that’s original and interesting and offers, if not new information, at least a new twist on the old. You’ve got to create content only you could write.

3. You don’t think about SEO at all.

Yeah yeah, I know. I just said that over-optimizing content results in bad content. That’s still true! Promise. But what’s also true is that you’ve gotta be smart about this. Thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of other companies are competing for the same handful of keywords. To scramble over them on your road to SERP glory, you’re going to need to spend some time researching keywords and figuring out not only what terms people are searching for, but what terms bring people to your website and then which terms get them to convert from a random visitor to a prospect.  This means spending quality time with both keyword research and your Google Analytics package. Don’t go nuts, but walk that delicate (and profitable) high wire between under-optimized stuff no one will ever see and over-optimized meh.

4. You don’t promote it.

There are more than 42 million blogs scattered across the Internet, ranging from teeny, tiny online bastions devoted to raising chinchillas to a massive, highly monetized blogging consortium.  With all that competition, how is anyone ever going to find your blog? It helps if you tell them about it. That might mean good old social media or a great email newsletter to drive people to your site. That might be plain old telling people about it (using your mouth–I know!) and asking them to visit your blog and tell their friends about it. Whatever you do, you can’t just create a blog, kick back and call it a day. You’ve got to have a plan.

We didn’t call this meeting to be all doom and gloom. The good news is, you can fix all of these things! Put together a great editorial calendar, hash out a strategy for promotion and you’re going to be right back on the straight and narrow to blogging success. Not sure where to start? There’s help.