Developing a content strategy is important to your digital marketing efforts. At the core of that content strategy lies your blog, and the content of it needs to be aimed towards success. To successfully write blog content that drives website traffic and produces leads, you need to understand the areas that many people make mistakes.
It’s common for bloggers to make certain mistakes, especially when they’re not sure how to begin writing content. In the beginning, I made many of them too. This list comes as much from my experience as it does from research.
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Producing Quality Blog Content Improves Your Web Presence
The first thing you want to understand about blog content is the purpose. You’re looking to position yourself well on the web, getting great search rankings and a high level of trust from your audience. Delivering high-quality blog content does that well.
When you consistently produce useful, interesting blog content, you’re associating your company and your name with authoritative knowledge in your industry. That means your audience is going to trust your word more, eventually leading them to buy from you.
You Can’t Afford To Waste Time On Bad Content
On the same token, bad blog content will kill your web presence. That’s a scenario you can’t afford to spend time on and will guarantee the long-term failure of your digital marketing efforts. For most small business owners, that’s career suicide.
Understanding the difference between good blog content and bad from a marketing perspective will help you make good choices, saving you time improving your results.
Avoid These Mistakes When Building Your Blog
If you want to understand what makes blog content good marketing material, it’s simpler to start with what you need to avoid. The nuances of your individual industry may change the bits and pieces that bring you success, but the mistakes are universal.
Let’s dig into the mistakes you need to avoid when creating your blog content.
Blogging Inconsistently Hurts
One of the most common mistakes when starting your company blog is inconsistency. Because new small business blogs are often run by the business owners, creating new blog content winds up being a process that contends for their time, which is already limited. As a result, content gets produced “when it can”.
Put a schedule or system in place for creating blog content regularly. If the budget allows, hire an internal person or external firm to handle your blog content for you so you can be certain things get done regularly and to a high-level of quality.
Boring Blog Content Kills Engagement
User engagement is one of the most valuable benefits of blog content. It’s a key component of SEO, and it’s even more imperative to encouraging shares among your readers. If you want your readers to stay engaged, you need to be interesting.
When you create boring blog content, readers won’t share it. They also won’t engage it, which means they’ll build a habit of ignoring it. The longer you spend creating boring content, the harder it will be to recover.
Never Put SEO Before Quality Blog Content
Writing your blog content with SEO in mind is important. You’re going to need to include proper keywords and structure to help Google rank you to be found. That includes a little bit of specialized formatting to help Google determine your content’s relevance.
For content creators new to blogging, falling into the SEO trap can kill the quality of your blog content. It’s normal to focus heavily on the keywords and format that you lose your sense of content and creativity. An aggressive focus on SEO components can make your content feel forced and often confuse your readers. That means they’ll stop reading.
Don’t Forget To Put A Blog Content Distribution Plan In Place
When you take the time to put together a great content plan, you want it to get seen. That means it needs to get sent through social channels. That’s how you create the highest level of engagement for every dollar you spend, especially because you don’t have to spend much to get great content distributed through social.
Without a solid blog content distribution plan, you’ll be relying completely on SEO for your exposure. While that’s not an entirely bad thing, effective content distribution is a huge catalyst for exposure and engagement. If your plan is incomplete or nonexistent, you’ll miss out on that extra fire that will propel your digital marketing.
Avoid Creating Content That Doesn’t Serve Your Audience
The best value that blog content can provide for your business is trust. When you create high-value content, your audience begins to view you as an authority in your industry, and they turn to you for answers to their questions. When it’s time to make the purchase, their odds of choosing you skyrocket.
If you create content that doesn’t provide them any value, that opportunity to gain trust is lost. Rather than leading your industry for your audience, you appear to simply exist in it. That means that, while they may go to you for additional information, they’ll likely look to your competition as their primary informer, later buying from them.
Don’t Use Fonts, Formats, Colors, Or Layouts That Are Difficult To Read
I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t focus on SEO formatting over quality blog content. However, if your overall formatting is bad, the quality of your content won’t matter. With conflicting colors, hard to read fonts, and formatting inconsistencies, your content will become hard to read. When that’s the case, your audience won’t engage.
Stick with the basics that always work. A dark font over a light background (like our site’s dark grey over white) is easy on the eyes. Typesetting and web standard fonts, like Times New Roman or Open Sans (the font you’re reading this in), make the text clear and easy to read. And, amazingly enough, breaking the left margin can confuse readers, causing them to navigate away from your blog content.
Never Release Content Without A Call-To-Action
Informing your audience is important when drafting your blog content. After all, they’re visiting your site to learn about your product or service. The information you provide is the first step to delivering them the kind of value that will eventually guide them to a purchase.
Part of the information you need to provide to those readers who are ready to buy is instruction on what to do next. Include a clear, easy-to-understand call-to-action in your blog content. When you do, your readers will know the next logical step in the buy process, moving them closer to becoming your client.
Writing Well-Crafted Blog Content Requires A Plan
To avoid all the blog content mistakes we’ve talked about, you’re going to need a plan. It’s really a simple process, only requiring a small portion of your time. In under an hour, and with the right tools, you can plan out your entire content year, assuring you are prepared to produce the best blog content possible.
