Why Don’t People Love Your Blog?
I’ve been there. It was seven years ago. I’d had a blog for about
six months and people just weren’t coming. I’d heard that all I had to
do to boost blog traffic was to create a blog and the visitors would
magically appear. I’d put keywords into it, right?
So, I waited. And waited. And waited.
The people just weren’t coming!
I tried a lot of different tactics to increase blog traffic to my
fledgling blog. I tried forum posts, autoresponder campaigns, videos,
linking everything I could to social media accounts, even some
“black-hat” SEO techniques.
Some things worked, and others much less so.
I tried system after system, hunting for the magic combination of
marketing and technology that was supposed to unlock the ultimate
secrets to increasing blog traffic. After all, I’d heard that more
traffic meant more money.
I learned a lot, but I wasn’t getting the type of traffic that I had heard about.
I knew deep down that I could make money online so I decided to give
it one more shot. I took everything that I had learned and studied what
worked and what didn’t.
I tested everything, tweaked what I could, and it started working.
Visitors were trickling in to my site. As I did more, that trickle
turned into a small stream. Then a river. Then a flood. I knew that
of all the things out there, I’d discovered something special.
I had discovered how to get blog traffic.
A lot of people with great ideas quit writing in their blogs when
they find out that blogging isn’t a fire and forget proposition. Google
is littered with the remains of online businesses that never got off
the groune, their owners discouraged. Do a search for anything, then
the word blog – I bet you’ll find many of these starting with page six.
It’s sad if you think about it, because they just gave up.
What many new bloggers don’t realize is that there’s a system behind
having people love your blog. If you want to make money with your blog
then you have to treat that blog like a business. What you may not
realize is that even though the platform changes, the rules of business
don’t change when you move from offline to online.
There is one major difference: It is far easier to make an online business than a physical business.
As all these abandoned businesses show, ease of access does not mean
ease of success! Here’s a rule of thumb: If your online blogging
business isn’t advertiser interest or significant traffic within six
months there is a serious problem with your business model.
The big problem that this ease of access has created is that there is
far more competition now than there ever was in the physical world.
Success in the online world is predicated on commanding the attention of
other people.
It doesn’t matter if you have the best product on the market.
You could be selling the cure for cancer, but if no one can find you, you are invisible.
This is why SEO and Social Media Marketing are so important. However,
they are just a part of the success story. Want to know the others?
The Pieces to a Successful Business
There are five core pieces to every successful business, online or
offline. They all need to work together in order to make a business
flourish. They are:
• Site Design
• Content
• Marketing
• Feedback
• Business Knowledge
If any one of these is missing, your business will be hampered
severely. Lack two of them and you’ll fail. Let’s go through what each
of these mean.
Site Design
Whether you want to sell something through your blog, or just want to
get a popular following, everything starts with the site design.
Marketing is the menu. Site design is the appetizer. That site design
sets the mood for the whole meal.
If you know your web metrics, you might know a term called bounce rate.
It’s a measure of how quickly someone leaves a particular web page.
In a nutshell, the bounce rate tells you how good or bad your content
is. A high bounce rate means that your visitors are finding something
unappealing about that page and leaving fast.
A bad website design will damage all your attempts to increase blog traffic. Avoid these errors:
• Poor site design (e.g. looks ugly, can’t find links, broken links,
shopping cart interface has a bad design, downloads don’t work, etc.)
• Over-aggressive marketing tactics. What “over-aggressive” means
will depend on your demographic. An example is a pop up as soon as a
site is visited. You’d have to offer something of very high value to not
annoy the visitor.
• Lack of valuable content. More on this below
It’s not as hard as it used to be. WordPress has thousands of free
themes to choose from and thousands of professional ones as well. Take a
few for a spin and see what’s out there.
Content
Content is the meat of every website. Without content, all the
marketing and design in the world won’t keep the attention of your
visitors. There’s really only one big key for making excellent content:
Write for your audience, and not for yourself, but while still being yourself.
Don’t know who your audience is? That’s a big problem if you’re
running a business. That’s why market research is so important. Where is
market research done on the internet? Social media websites. Don’t like
social media? Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to succeed with
your blog to any great level unless you engage with your audience where
they hang out.
Also, if you have problems with spelling or grammar, then it’s time
to consider a course in copywriting or hire someone who is able to write
to your message.
Marketing
If you need a definition for marketing, it’s all the activities that
you do to attract customers that don’t currently know or care about your
business. Marketing also includes promotional activities for people
that may already be familiar with your business.
There is a pervasive attitude of “if you build it, they will come” in
online businesses that still hasn’t been uprooted yet. It is an
extremely dangerous attitude to have. More savvy individuals may know
about SEO and Social Media Marketing, but they cling to a different
mantra. “If I’m on page one in the SERPs, they will come.”
This is a more accurate statement. Most people only look at the first
three links in any Google search. According to a study done by Chitika,
an online ad network:
• 91.5% of all clicked links in Google are from the first page. Only
4.8% are clicked from the second page. It gets much worse from there.
• The top link gets 32.5% of the clicks. The second gets 17.6%. The third gets 11.4%, and the fourth gets 8.1%.
That means that nearly 70% of all clicks in Google are done in the first four results.
However, what most businesses fail to realize is that it’s not just
about targeting the proper keywords, collecting back links, having
proper anchor text, and all the other nuts-and-bolts of SEO that pushes a
site up to these levels. There has to be something of value on your
website that make people want to come back to it again and tell others
about what they’ve found. These create social indicators, and they’re
very important. Google is increasingly using social indicators in their
ranking algorithms.
They’re weighed almost as heavily as backlinks!
The overall goal of marketing is to get people to come to your
website, boosting blog traffic. Therefore, your marketing must appeal to
your target audience, and it must also communicate value to them. If
you want people to give you attention, you must give them something they
consider worthy of attention. Without attention, you’ll never make a
sale.
Feedback
Once you get traffic, you have to keep the conversation going. Your
customers are not going to be shy about praising or complaining about
your business or your viewpoints. Gathering customer feedback allows you
to change your content and marketing approaches to match what your
customers want. This is another place where social media comes in.
Social media shines the best when it is used as a feedback tool.
Each social media website appeals to a different type of person and
is suitable for different marketing opportunities. If you want to learn
them, the best way is to jump in yourself and get involved. In a
nutshell:
• Facebook: Mass-market appeal generation
• Twitter: B2C conversations
• LinkedIn: B2B conversations
• G+: People who want to build brands around an individual and people in IT.
Use social media to actively listen to and engage with your
customers. Gary Vaynerchuk built a wine empire by going out onto Twitter
and answering every question he could find about wine. He’s gone on to
be one of the main role-models for learning intense social media
interaction with an audience. If you can be just as aggressive in your
own niche, you’ll see the results for yourself.
Business Knowledge
Since running a blog is running a business, having knowledge about
running a business is a must. Business skills can be learned from
courses, hiring a business manager, getting a mentor, or even reading
business blogs. You may be at the point where you don’t yet know what
you need to know – that’s where voracious reading comes in handy.
100% of the shots you don’t take, ,don’t score. You’re not going to
get visitors coming to your blog by reading about the ways that blogs
should work. It’s best to have a system in place and follow that system
– one that adheres to the five business principles.
If you don’t, it will be like trying to get visitors to a lemonade
stand that you set up in a deserted alley. To really get in the game,
you have to attract attention, draw them in and get them to love you.
Your Turn
I know that there’s a lot of people out there who are overwhelmed
with information about blogging. Are there any places where you’ve got
questions? Are you wondering where to start? Do you have some tricks
that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment
section.
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