Content marketing can be very effective in attracting new clients to your practice, however, you want to make sure that you avoid these common blogging mistakes:
1. Creating Two Websites – Having a blog for your company is a great way to provide useful information that can draw potential clients to your site. However, this won’t work as well if your blog is separate (has a different URL) from your company’s main site.
Every blog that you post creates a webpage that will be indexed by search engines, meaning it’s important that your blog is associated with your company’s main site so that it gets credit for those pages and keywords. If it isn’t, you won’t be generating traffic to your main site, instead your blog will act as a second site.
2. Poor Blog Content – Your blog posts should be relevant to your clients and potential clients. Focus on providing information-rich content instead of “salesy” posts about company products and achievements. Blog posts that are educational are more helpful to your client, and are more likely to be linked to by other writers, meaning they have a much better chance of reaching a wider audience.
3. Being Boring – blogging is different than most other business writing. It is important to remain professional, but it okay to add some personality into your writing. Write in a more conversational tone.
4. Infrequent Blog Updates – Too often blogs are started, then we get busy, and end up ignoring it for months at a time. Aim to blog at least once a week – there is definitely a relationship between post frequency and traffic.
If you update the content on your blog at least 20 times a month, you’ll find that you’ll generate around five times as much traffic than if you only updated your blog four times or less a month. The more you update your blog content, the more traffic you’ll generate to your company’s main website.
5. Not Using Social Media – Social media sites can be a great way to gain exposure for you content. Plan on using multiple social media accounts to share your content, including Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, and Triberr.
6. Making Social Sharing Difficult – I’m still surprised at how often I read blogs that don’t provide an RSS subscription, or an easy way to “share” the article on social media. Make sure that you set up “share” buttons and they are easy to find .
7. Lack of Engagement – Monitor your blog and social media sites for engagement. Make sure your respond to any questions in a timely and professional manner.
8. Ignoring SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a valuable marketing strategy, and is one of the strengths of content marketing. Determine what keywords or questions your potential clients are entering into the search engines and develop content around those keywords and questions. Optimize those pages for search.
9. Forget to add a Call-to-Action – What do you want your reader to do next – subscribe to your newsletter, schedule an appointment, download your eBook? A Call-to-Action nudges them in that direction – it provides guidance towards that next step that you want them to take.
10. Use Copyrighted Photos – images are a great addition to any blog post – they definitely help to engage the reader. However, finding good images can be a challenge, especially when you first begin blogging.
Related: Why Improving Your LinkedIn Profile is Important for Every Business Professional
Searching for images on Google brings up a great selection, unfortunately the copyright can be difficult to determine and so the image should be assumed to be protected. Recently, the owners of those photos and copyrights have begun to more vigorously defend their copyrights through large fines. The image for this post is from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Starting a blog can be a challenge, but through patience, persistence, and use of best practices, can become a valuable marketing asset to your firm.
As always, thanks for reading. Your comments and questions are welcomed and appreciated. What mistakes would you ad to our list?