5 Reasons Your Blog May be Stifling Your Traffic

Creating and writing a blog is a great way to inform or educate your readers, engage visitors on your website, and promote your services and products. But what if you’ve been blogging for a while and your readership and sales are weak? What can be done?

Here are five common, easily identifiable, and correctable potential reasons:

Promotion of Blog

Not only do you need to promote your message, product or services, you need to promote your blog itself. Get your blog and its content in front of readers.

If you need a plan for promotion of your blog, here are a few things to consider:

• Learn How to Grow Subscriber Lists – generate the kind of content that your readers want to see, then ask them to come back regularly.
• Promote Your Blog Content – provide relevant and meaningful content, then let others know about it in groups, on pages, or in communities that need your information.
• Join a Blog Community – look for others who write about similar topics and guest blog, share, and promote their info. Ask for reciprocation.
• Collaborate – reach out other bloggers in your industry to create original materials that both parties can promote, and all readers can benefit from.

Searchability/Stats

In order to reach your audience with your desired purpose, you have to make yourself findable. Learn who is searching for similar info that you provide and how they are finding that similar info.

If your stats are not reflecting the traffic you seek, research these potential causes:

• Concentrate Your Analytics on Immediate Traffic – look for trends with your current readers, then leverage that with future content.
• Clever Vs. Keyword – be careful not to leave out keyword-rich titles for the sake of being clever. Know your content’s keywords and put at least one in the title to enhance searchability.
• SEO Neglect – include relevant links and keywords in the body of your post that will drive up your SEO ranking in search engines so that you stay top of mind with both readers and search engines.

Your Purpose

When your goal is to attract regular readers and potential customers to your message via a blog, you have to know your purpose. Think about why you are writing and what you want it to accomplish.

If you don’t have a target or purpose, you may run into the following problems:

• Unrelated/ Broad Topics – your blog ideas will come across as random and disconnected thus leaving the reader confused as to what they are reading.
• Oversharing Info or Under-sharing Your Expertise – if you write everything you know about one particular topic rather than breaking it up into a series, readers are less likely to stay long enough to find the information they need. Conversely, if you don’t display the fact that you know your topic, readers will seek information elsewhere.
• Perfectionism – if you try to make every post perfect, you will spend needless time and energy. Yes, keep it quality, but don’t let yourself get mired in making it perfect. Just deliver the info and tweak later if necessary.
• Posting Inconsistency – readers like stability, so post on a regular basis to keep them coming back.

You might also be interested in: Things you can’t afford to miss with WordPress.

Audience

Define who you want to reach with your message, product, or service. You need to know who you are talking to as much as your purpose for writing.

If you find that you are missing a target demographic, consider the following as reasons:

• Follow Through – if you think you’re done once the writing and posting is done, you are missing out on potential customer conversions and the opportunity to provide better customer service.
• Know Your Niche – as much as knowing your audience, you need to know the market into which you are entering. Be clear about where you focus your time and message.
• Engaging Your Readers – give your readers a call to action. Ask them for their opinion, their feedback, or their stories.
• Take time to respond thoughtfully – when you get blog comments, think about a relevant response and thank the reader for their interaction

Your Writing Skills

Blogging needs writing skills in order to get desired results. You’ll need to have, at minimum, a cursory knowledge of story structure, grammar and spelling skills (please don’t think that spell checks are enough), and communication techniques.

Here are few things to troubleshoot that your website or blog may be lacking:

• Check Your Tone – are you writing in a formal tone or conversational tone? Make sure your tone matches your topics and audience.
• Original Content – be careful to ensure that your content is original so that you cannot be suspected of plagiarism. Yes, you can use ideas from other sources, but put in the work to word it in such a way that it is your own. If you choose to use the work of another writer or author, always give proper credit or attribution.
• Bad Writing – make your writing quality by observing basic spelling, grammar and sentence structure.
• Use Data (and use it well) – don’t neglect sprinkling in appropriate and accurate numbers to support your statements.
• Be Mindful of Your Audience – first, know who you are writing for and why. Secondly, make sure that you are writing to them, not for yourself. Strive to meet their needs and wants.
• Prefer Quality Over Quantity – just because you post 3 times each week, does not mean that you are providing your readers with helpful information. You may be adding to the internet noise and not truly meeting needs with solutions.
• Add Value – be able to talk about a variety of topics related to your readers interests and not only pushing your company, products and services.

By following the basics outlined here, you will build credibility, expertise, and loyal readers for your blog.