Struggling With Your Blog? Improve With These Three Tips
By Sté Kerwer to Blogging
Let’s cut right to the chase. You’re about ready to give up because you haven’t made a cent with your blog, but that’s the worst thing you can do. You already have a blog in place and that’s half the battle. Too many bloggers give up when all they really needed to do was just make a couple of changes. Here are 3 tips you can use to improve you blog and get yourself out of this slump.
Define Your Goal: What exactly are you trying to accomplish with your blog? You need to set one firm goal and then get rid of everything that’s not relevant. If you’re selling a service – what service do you want to sell and who do you want to sell it to. If you’re selling a product – what does it do and who would be interested in buying it.
The Internet is too big and there’s just too much competition now for anyone to set up a blog first, and then decide what they’re going to do with it after they start getting traffic. Everything about your blog – from blog design to your content – influences the buying decision. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing with your site, then your visitors will be just as confused as you are.
Identify Your Audience: Think of your audience as a target and your blog posts as arrows. If you shoot 100 arrows at one single target, chances are you’re going to get quite a few bullseyes. But if you shoot those same 100 arrows at 100, or even 50, different targets, a lot of those arrows are going to whiz right past the target and out into cyberspace.
To identify your audience you need to know the features and benefits of your product or service. What does it do and how will that help someone? Then you need to determine who would benefit most from those features and benefits and aim your marketing at that specific target.
Focus Your Content: Now that you know exactly what you’re selling and exactly who would benefit from buying it, you can do the keyword research for your content. This is where it gets tricky.
Let’s say you’re trying to sell XYZ Kitty Litter. We all know the main features and benefits of Kitty Litter, but you can also use it to line ashtrays, to absorb grease in your garage, to eliminate odors in your refrigerator, to fill bean bag toys and dozens of other possible uses. But the people who will benefit most from your Kitty Litter are those who have cats. You can market to people who have ashtrays, garage spills and smelly refrigerators, but your sales are going to come from people who have cats. So you’re wasting your time blogging about all of that other stuff. You need to use keyword that will attract only those people who have cats.
When you try to address too many different market segments on one blog you end up with a lot of unhappy, non-buying blog visitors. Most people will not buy something online just because they read one blog post that said they should. It’s a fact that most buyers have to see something 7 to 10 times before they’ll feel comfortable enough to make the purchase.
So let’s say someone visits your Kitty Litter blog to find out about the best kitty litter for his new cat. He sees one article about cats and then he has to sift through information about using kitty litter to absorb grease and refrigerator odors and ashes. He’ll never find enough information to make him feel comfortable on your blog because you talk about everything BUT what he wants to know.
The search engines, too, will be confused if your content isn’t focused and you won’t rank well for anything at all. In fact, you might even find yourself de-indexed if your content is too weak and thready.
Maybe you are trying to sell a product that would appeal to more than one target audience. And that’s very possible. If that’s the case, set up a completely different blog on a different domain so each blog will rank for its own keywords.
The best way to improve your blog traffic and sales is to concentrate on one specific niche market and load up tons of good quality, tightly focused content. Don’t worry about trying to cover the whole market. Concentrate on one little corner at a time until you’re successful. Then worry about conquering the world.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
Source : dukeo[dot]com
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