Years ago, I had a client who ran an ecommerce website selling clothing and bedding. I wrote blog posts for their website, about 20-30 posts per month.
By the end of one year, out of nowhere, he let me know that he would no longer need my services as he didn’t think the blog posts were doing anything for his business.
At that time I was angry and thought him foolish. Of course, that was probably the fear of losing part of my income talking.
But he was right. Why have a blog that costs money to maintain but doesn’t bring in any money? It’s a money pit.
This was a big part of why I decided to help businesses avoid dead-end blogs that suck up precious business resources. The approach I use these days is very different from then.
Why Most Blogs Are Money Pits
From talking to many business owners and marketing managers, most don’t believe their blog content does anything for their bottom-line.
It’s often treated as a must-have marketing channel with a hazy impact on actual business growth.
They do it because:
They think or are told they must do it. It’s part of having an online business.
They believe it’s working for the intended purpose. That is, traffic.
You might be thinking, “My blog isn’t a money pit, it brings a lot of traffic to my website.”
That’s great and I mean that genuinely. Having a blog that draws traffic is a big accomplishment and can be helpful for your business in areas like search engine ranking and brand visibility.
But the biggest question you need to answer is: what impact does it have on your bottom line? Is it bringing in customers, and not just traffic?
For a vast majority of businesses, the answer is no.
Even the blogs that get a lot of traffic will typically not contribute much in terms of qualified leads and customers.
But because you’ve got traffic, every stakeholder is happy to keep the blog chugging along.
Your Blog is One of Your Most Powerful Marketing Tools
When done right, a blog can become the biggest source of qualified leads for your business.
My concern is not so much that a bad blog is bad for business. Usually, having a decent quality blog won’t hurt your business and can even help a bit.
My concern is the opportunity cost. You are directing precious business resources — time, money or the skills of an in-house content team — towards something with no or low returns.
You could be reaping huge from those same resources, if you applied them right.
5 Reasons Your Blog Is Not Growing Your Business
Quality, quality, quality.
That’s been a constant gospel in content marketing. We are told Google cares most about content quality and that customers love high quality content.
So that’s the main goal of many businesses when they start a blog — fill it with high quality content. And by high quality, they mean well written.
What you end up with are highly polished e-magazines that do little for business growth.
Here are 5 reasons why your blog content, as well written as it is, is not growing your business.
1. It’s Not Written For Your Target Customers
I keep saying this on my LinkedIn: most blogs are essentially magazines.
A magazine is written to target a broad swath of people, whether it’s a certain gender, age group or economic class. Businesses, knowingly or otherwise, take the same approach.
They mostly write top-level content that targets as many people as possible, including those who will never buy from them.
I often see mattress sellers turn their blog into a sleep magazine, outdoor clothing companies write an outdoor magazine and HR SaaS providers write endlessly about productivity and employee management.
On the surface, it makes sense to write widely across your industry. You want to attract as many customers as possible. But while this strategy can attract traffic, the conversion rate to paying customers is abysmal.
Instead, be laser focused on your target customers. This means first knowing who your customers are and learning as much as you can about them.
Blog content written specifically for your target customers may bring in less traffic, but the conversion rate is higher, resulting in more sales.
2. It Doesn’t Solve Your Customers’ Problems
Go to your blog right now and check the last 10 blog posts. Can you name the specific problems each blog post solves?
If you can’t, then your approach to blogging is not the right one. I am not saying all blog posts need to solve a problem, but a majority of them should.
If you are really writing for your target customers, then your content should be focused on their problems and needs. This creates the perfect opportunity to then introduce your product as a solution.
Say you sell hiking boots. Content about the best hiking trails, what to pack for hiking and so on doesn’t really solve problems for your target customers. Instead, it attracts mostly low-intent outdoor enthusiasts who were probably not even thinking about getting hiking boots.
But if your blog posts address specific problems, then you will attract more high-intent traffic consisting of people shopping for hiking boots or thinking about getting a new pair.
For example, here are some long-tail keywords that address specific pain points, needs or use cases:
Best hiking boots for hiking in the rain
Hiking boots that feel like sneakers
Hiking boots that stay cool
Lightweight hiking boots
You can create high converting blog posts based on these keywords.
One brand that follows this strategy is Jackery. They make portable solar generators for outdoors and emergencies.
Sure, they have some general outdoor and lifestyle content. But most of their blog posts revolve around particular customer needs, problems or applications. So people searching for solutions are more likely to find their content and end up buying a Jackery power station.
3. It’s Not Specific Enough
As you address your customer pain points, your blog content needs to be as specific as possible. This makes it more helpful to your potential customers.
Specificity involves describing exactly what problem(s) your customers might be facing and providing specific solutions.
Let’s say you sell leave management software and you are writing a post advising companies on how to improve their leave management system. Specificity here involves:
Laying out the exact problems with outdated ways of managing employee leave. Don’t just say the old way is bad, say exactly why it’s bad. Does it reduce productivity? How? Does it cost the company more money? How?
Being specific about the problems allows potential buyers to relate to your content. It also reveals to them problems they may have not thought of, further incentivizing them to buy your product.
Laying out the specific solutions. Don’t just say you should use leave management software. Tell them what benefits the software offers to their business. Remember to be specific and detailed about the benefits, providing evidence where you can from case studies or your internal data.
E.g. Leave management software improves strategic planning to ensure all teams stay productive.
That’s good but don’t leave it there. Show exactly how it improves strategic planning and why it’s better over other methods of leave management.
In the case above, I would show how the software allows strategic planning of leave days so that there are no understaffed teams.
4. It’s Not Convincing
One of the reasons I insist so much on specificity is because it’s how you sell your product. It forces you to explain your product features and benefits, in detail.
Otherwise, you have general content that doesn’t convince potential customers that your solution is the right one.
Remember there is so much general content out there. You need to stand out and make your content convincing.
Another thing: do not be shy about sounding salesy. I come across so many blog posts where you can’t even tell which brand is behind it. And if they mention their product, it’s in passing towards the end.
It’s your blog, it’s your website. Be aggressive about selling your product. Let readers know why they should go with your product and what makes it better than others.
To do this in a friendly non-cringey way, you also need to solve specific customer problems with your content.
For example, look at how Jackery confidently sells their products in this post about using electric generators for home emergencies (a common customer need).
They insert their products right in the introduction, not afraid to toot their own horn. Then towards the end of the post, they talk about the features of one of their solar generators that they recommend for home emergencies.
5. It’s Optimized for Traffic, Not Conversion
Most online businesses are focused on getting more traffic to their website. So their approach to blog content is one that is based heavily on high-volume keywords. That is, keywords that a lot of people search for.
There are two problems with this approach.
One, high-volume keywords are competitive since everyone is optimizing for them. So ranking highly based on these keywords takes a lot of time and effort, and may never even happen.
For example, here are high-volume keywords related to ‘fleet management’. You can see they all have a hard keyword difficulty (KD). A fleet management software provider should still target these keywords, but should not focus only on them.
In contrast, the keyword ‘how to stop employee fuel theft’ has less volume but higher buying intent. It’s also easier to rank for.
And this is the second problem with a traffic-only based approach to blog writing. It results in low conversion.
It attracts traffic with low buying intent. So even if you rank high and get loads of traffic to your website, it may not result in a commensurate boost in sales.
But if you base your keyword strategy on customer pain points (e.g. employee fuel theft), you attract high-intent traffic. This results in lower traffic but higher conversions.
Your blog becomes a powerful marketing channel that grows your business.
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