By Antonia Chitty and Erica Douglas of www.aceinspire.com
If you have started a business blog filled with great intentions, yet a few weeks or months down the line are depressed and uninspired about blogging, you’re not alone. Although blogging can seem simple, there are also common errors that, once you know about them, are easy to avoid. Read on too get some trouble shooting advice from Erica Douglas and Antonia Chitty of ACEInspire:
Problem 1: I don’t know what to blog about!
It can be easy to start blogging then find your ideas dry up after a few weeks or months. Think of 3 or 4 main topics or keywords you want your blog to cover. For example if you sell diaries for mums your topics might be – getting organised, stationery and dates to remember. For each of these write as many different sub-topics as you can think of. So for getting organised you could cover – tips for remembering things, clearing clutter, having a system for remembering birthdays, creating a family schedule or chores rota etc. Each of these sub headings is a blog post. For more on coming up with endless ideas for blog posts watch this video – 40 Blog Post Ideas in 5 minutes. Book in time to do this once a month and have a ‘blog ideas’ notebook or file and you’ll soon find blog post ideas are coming to you every day.
Problem 2: I’m not getting visitors to my blog
If your blog is new have you registered it with Google? You can do that here – http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl Think about what promotion you’ve done to spread the word about your blog. Have you been promoting your blog on Facebook and twitter? Have you been commenting on other blogs in your niche? A good way to raise your profile and attract visitors back to your blog is to do some guest posts on other blogs in your niche or in complementary niches. Try to do 3 things to promote each post you write, and see which are most effective in bringing in visitors.
Problem 3: I’m not getting comments on my posts
Firstly check how many visitors you have. If you don’t have many visitors then it stands to reason that you won’t have many (if any) comments. If visitors aren’t an issue then review your content: is it engaging? Are you finishing your posts with a question? Perhaps your audience feel they need to be invited to comment.
You might want to start writing response posts to other bloggers topics and inviting them to comment and share their views, or get controversial and write on ‘hot topics’. Share these posts on Twitter and Facebook too and proactively invite people to come and share their views.
Finally, when you do get a comment always respond and encourage further debate.
Problem 4: My blog isn’t bringing in more business
Firstly, how do you know that your blog isn’t bringing in business? Are you monitoring it? If you are monitoring it then look first to your traffic, do you have a lot of visitors? If visitors aren’t the problem check your stats package and look at pageviews, and time spent on your site. Are people engaged with your content? If so do you have a product funnel in place that invites people to join an email list so you can contact them directly? To increase sales via your blog you really need to ensure that each part of the flow of visitors and customers is working correctly. It’s a bit like making sure there aren’t any holes in your bucket. Too many holes and by the time you get back to your sandcastle there’s nothing left! It’s the same when you’re trying to get clients from not knowing you at all to becoming a loyal customer, you have to navigate them step by step from social media, to your blog, then onto your email list and then finally offering something that they want to buy.
If you want to learn how to blog for business success, join Erica and Antonia’s free 21 week ACE blogger eCourse, which takes you step by step through what you need to do to build a great business blog. Join today at www.aceinspire.com
photo credit: susan solinski