The Marketing View, Blogging Is EASY, If You Know How

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Blogging Is EASY, If You Know How

1. Engage

If your blog is a one-way conversation for your ideas, offering no way for your visitors to engage in conversations, interact, and provide feedback or just plain ‘ole talk to you, then you are not drawing people into your circle or tribe.

Remember that your blog’s readers are critical to the success of your blog, and treat them as such. The purpose of publishing a blog, is to create your tribe of potential customers, and they want to be heard.

2. No Video

Yeah, making videos can be hard and you might be camera shy.  But get over it!

One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words (Forrester Research). Video engages your visitors on a totally different level than written content does, they can SEE you and feel like they know you.

3. No Audio

Many bloggers overlook the power of sharing audio on their blogs or creating an audio podcast of their content because it’s complicated to setup and takes too much time to figureout.

It’s not about you. It’s about your audience. Are you ignoring those in your community

who would love your content but don’t love reading and would much rather listen?

You’ve heard of Audible and BlogTalkRadio, right? Stand out and attract those listeners by using audio on your blog! Offering your content in more formats allows you to grow a wider following. With audio, your “readers” can listen while they commute, jog, or when ever else they want.

4. Not Blogging Reguarly 

You have a blog but you aren’t publishing posts on a regular basis, and when you do post, you’re not

publishing enough articles with engaging content to make your blog effective.

FACT: Businesses that blog at least 20x per month generate

over 5x more traffic than those that blog fewer than 4 times

per month.

FACT: Businesses that blog at least 20x per month generate

nearly 4x more leads than those that don’t blog.

In addition, there is a direct correlation between the frequency of blogging and the volume of traffic

and leads. Remember the data earlier in this report from HubSpot’s research and its lead generation lessons from 4,000 businesses, which indicated that the more often a company blogs, the better that company is able to generate traffic and leads.

Ignoring your blog rather than keeping it updated with fresh content means you are leaving prospective customers on the table.

6. Terrible Blog Layout

You’re focusing 100% on content and ignoring valuable design elements of your blog that can act as powerful boosters of traffic and leads for your business.

You may even be driving away readers who can’t focus on your content because of your awful layout.

Yes, as an inbound marketer, your blog content has to be amazing. However, a bad blog design can hamper even the best content.

Distracting Colors

This is having a color scheme that distracts from your blogs message and causes visitors to leave sooner rather than stay and interact with your blog.

This one might not seem like a biggie, but having total control over your blog’s color scheme and having pre-done combinations is super key.

There are two ways to remedy this:

1) You could study color theory and then go out and purchase an expensive blog template (assuming you can even find one with the colors you want, that doesn’t require more customization) and install it on your blog or…

2) You could simply decide to join the Blog Beast program and get access to the pre-done themes that the Empower Network development team has incorporated as options within the platform.

These combinations have been split-tested with millions of visitors, so they are designed to get you the best results.

A clear, lead-focused blog design will help turbocharge the results of your inbound marketing content.

Lack of Viral Architecture

Neglecting to properly incorporate and leverage social sharing that drives traffic and further engagement through viral distribution of your content.

Too much of a good thing can be bad. Yes, you want people to share your blog posts, and having social sharing buttons on your blog is helpful.

However, giving people too many sharing options is distracting. It actually causes users to become overwhelmed and…..

subsequently, take no action.

Limit the sharing buttons on your blog to only those networks where your ideal prospects are active and that send traffic and leads to your business.

If you don’t get any traffic from StumbleUpon, then why clutter your blog with its button?

The development team at Empower Network have extensively researched which social sharing mechanisms and configurations perform the best. Your best bet is to simply rely on the millions they’ve spent testing traffic and button configurations.

 Now you’re ready to start your blog and drive traffic to your business – whatever that may be!  No blogger blunders for you!!

GET YOUR BLOG HERE!

Please share this with someone who could use the information. – Thanks!

valeska@valeskavanvliet.com

Cheers,

Valeska