You’ve learned the basics of blogging, and you actually have a business blog.
You add the occasional post (when you have time) – and sometimes you stick to a schedule (until the next business crisis pushes posting out of your mind.)
But there isn’t a lot of traffic to your blog.
You tell yourself it doesn’t matter: You just need it there to refer potential and existing clients to an actual “website”.
One where they can view the basic essentials for your business.
If this sounds like you, be warned – you’re missing out on huge potential for making your blog increase your profits – in more ways than you might think!
In fact, this approach sounds more like “business slogging” than “blogging”, doesn’t it?
If you’re not enthusiastic about your own blog, you can be assured of one fact: Your clients will be even more inclined to “take it or leave it!”
Take a moment right now to answer the following 4 crucial questions.
(Don’t worry, if you can’t come up with clear answers: By the end of this report, you can ask yourself the questions all over again.
I guarantee that if you’ve put my suggestions into practice, you’ll be a lot more clear about your business blog’s purpose – and how it’s going to make money for you.)
1. What do you want your blog to do for you and your business?
2. Are you taking advantage of your blog’s main difference over a static site – its database capacity?
3. Is your blog properly optimized for search engines?
4. What do you need to promote – your services, a product – or you, yourself?
If you’re hazy about any of these questions, don’t worry. We’re going to work on streamlining your focus, while figuring out the essentials your blog needs. But first, a “refresher”…
Your Readers
You are writing and maintaining your blog primarily for your readers.
And who are your readers?
Ideally, your target market – the people who you would like to turn into subscribers and customers!
Before you write every post, ask yourself these 3 questions:
- “What will my target customer get out of this post?”
- “Why should she read my blog and not my competitors’?
- What “WOW!” factor difference does my blog offer?”
Remember – you want your readers to…
- Know exactly who you are – and feel that you stand out above others in your field
- Enjoy or find value in your posts enough to want to subscribe to your RSS feeds or newsletter
- Feel that you are a necessary, useful and enjoyable part of their life
- Be eager to let their friends know about your great site
- Turn into a loyal customer or client
This is the first step to creating a money-making blog.
You can’t have a blog that makes money unless it fills a need and attracts strong, relevant traffic first.
If you have a site is just an excuse for your contact information and an impersonal, non-specific blurb or slogan such as:
“For all your business needs”, along with the same, never-changing handful of posts that bored you to tears while you wearily cobbled them together (back in the dawn of time)… what incentive are you offering them to remember you – and return?
Likewise, if you haven’t posted since 2002 – you are literally turning your back on – and totally ignoring – multiple sources of increased revenue.
Your Focused Purpose
If you’ve been taking your business blog for granted, you will need to make sure you incorporate at least some of the following goals and tactics into your blog planning strategy:
- Increase your web “presence”
- Showcase your clients – and their successes
- Display your industry expertise and credentials
- Be the “go to” place for the latest industry or niche news
- Share resources such as free reports, audio files or “how to” videos
- Give them what they want or need to learn or hear
- Create some actual passive income for you
Not all of these points may apply to your business blog, but this is a good time to invest in some planning or re-focusing.
Think about each point.
How can you add that particular benefit to your blog?
Does that point apply to your business – or would it be something that hurts it?
Think of your business blog for what it actually is – your voice, speaking directly to potential clients, when you aren’t around.
It’s like having a partner who’s hard at work – even while you’re asleep!
Your Ultimate Business Blog Goal
Let’s take a look at other ways to stop the nasty habit of leaving all sorts of cash behind on your blogging “table”.
Implement even a few suggestions in my report, and you can give your business blog a chance to bring in new traffic, new subscribers, new credibility and authority – and more profit than you though possible, when you first downloaded this report!
(And I hope you at least have a sign up form – even if all it’s for is to allow you to automatically update subscribers when you’ve posted something new.)
Improving your Blog Traffic
There are some steps you must take immediately, if you want your blog to dramatically increase in pre-qualified traffic.
(What is “pre-qualified” traffic? Readers who are likely to buy from you or use your services – and readers who will prize what you have to say, and return again and again.)
1. Don’t underestimate the importance of your domain name – which ideally should be the same as your blog name.
If you created your domain name from the first thing that came into your head, consider whether it’s too late to change it and start again, promoting a new blog – or whether you’re well known enough, with a big enough subscriber list, to consider yourself branded.
2. Consider whether or not you want to attract readers by branding… or through your most relevant keywords
What is branding?
Simply becoming known by the name of your company.
For example, if I were to say “McDonalds”, the odds are you’d instantly think of the famous fast-food restaurant chain, rather than some obscure Scottish kilt maker’s shop in Dumfries, Scotland. Likewise, if I said “Nike”, you’d instantly think of sneakers.
Attracting readers by highly relevant keywords means your domain would have a name such as “FastEffectiveCopy.com” or “howtobakeacake.com”.
If you’re thinking of setting up a brand new blog – or subsidiary blog – for your business, this is a powerful way to increase your Google page rank very quickly.
If you want to really brand yourself and your blog, you might do that through a really unique name combined with what you hope will become a highly recognizable logo.
If your blog has been in existence for a few years, a subtle header redesign and the addition of a newly-designed logo (and blog colors) will be more effective than a drastic change.
Sometimes, you can combine both functions – branding and using a well optimized keyphrase.
If your blog is on a public platform such as WordPress or Blogger, move it to your own domain immediately. (If you can’t figure out how to do this yourself, don’t waste time – outsource and pay a professional to do it!)
Why is this so important?
Well, blogs hosted on free public platforms have a nasty tendency to disappear for no explicable reason, now and again – especially if you’ve made any attempts to monetize them with advertising or affiliate links.
RSS Feed – One of the most effective ways to improve traffic to your blog: Distribute it as RSS feed.
When you create a feed for your blog – a simple, one-time process anyone can do – you triple its effectiveness and desirability.
Ideally, you want people to depend on your regular posts as a useful and enjoyable part of their daily routine.
One of the strongest tips I can give you: Think of them reading your posts this way, when you write.
Your reader wants fast, easily read content that is punchy and to the point.
You have only a few seconds to really capture his attention before he skips over you and moves on to the next item in his RSS feed reader.
Think of this – and you’ll be less inclined to ramble, go off on tangents – or skip writing posts for days at a time altogether.
If you’ve forgotten how to create an RSS feed, or never bothered to learn – now is the time!
Plug Ins – One other strong way to improve traffic to your blog: Re-examine your plug in use.
- Have you added too many plug ins?
- Do your existing plug ins serve your blog’s most vital SEO and efficiency needs?
Remember that plug ins can perform tasks such as:
- Generating a Privacy Policy page
- Allowing you to run efficient and pleasing to the eye photo galleries
- Allowing you to display and run videos
- Allowing a new “famous quote” to be randomly generated every day
- Increasing your search engine efficiency
- Displaying buttons so that readers can instantly promote you across their favorite Social Networks
…And many more uses!
One common hazard reported by those who have been blogging for a while: loading up their blog with too many of these helpful little tools.
Plug ins can be real memory hogs.
Having too many may undo all the good you think you’ve added – your blog will slow down so much, it will take forever to load in.
Countless studies have proven… when people have to wait more than 10 seconds for a page to load in, they are much more likely to grow impatient and skip on to the next blog – or look elsewhere for the answer to the question that brought them to your blog in the first place.
A good rule of thumb: Install only the basic plug ins you’ll need – 7 maximum is a good “rule of thumb”.
Minimum basic, necessary plug ins I recommend:
- All In One SEO
- Eric Giguere’s Privacy Policy plug in (a “must”, if you are displaying Adsense ads)
- WP-PageNavi
- A Social Media plug in (Sociable is the one I like, but there are several excellent choices)
- Akismet (Anti spam plug in)
- A security plug in
Any other plug in you decide to add should be tightly targeted to your blog’s main purpose. Otherwise, forego the temptation.
And do pay attention, in your blog dashboard, to the little colored warning circle that will appear in your blog, every time a plug in needs to be updated.
Keep your plug ins (and your WordPress version) updated.
Just make sure, at the very least, that every time you upgrade All In One SEO, you re-click the “enable” button.
SEO – We’ve already spoken about plug ins as a way to (directly or indirectly) increase your search engine optimization.
There are 2 other ways to increase your SEO. If you’ve been sloppy about either of these, it’s time to revisit them:
Create backlinks – Are you posting high value, relevant comments in other related blogs and forums?
And if you do, are you also making use of that most valuable SEO tool – your signature? It’s amazing how many people either:
1. Forget to create a link to their own blogs in allowed signatures
2. Use their signatures when they shouldn’t – I.E.: In non-related blogs. (This can actually lower your page rank, if you cross-post in too many blogs not relevant to your website link’s subject using your backlink.)
Here’s a good example of a forum signature that prompts the reader with a strong call to action:
“Michael Manly
Visit Dileas Gu Brath for your easy, F.R.E.E. tutorial on Celtic wedding artwork”
(Note that the above signature does 2 things. It provides:
- Your name and contact information
- Provides a direct link to the poster’s blog that offers a
You would not bother to post the above comment on a blog about rescuing orphaned animals – people absorbed in this subject are hardly likely to be interested in learning about Celtic knotwork.
However, if you were to post a comment with this signature on a blog about Scottish weddings, Celtic art or medieval embroidery, your click-through rate and relevancy status with Google is likely to be comparatively high.
Whether you are engaged in personal blogging or business blogging, the key is to regularly post content in your blog.
This will not only help your blog rank higher in the search engines in due course of time, but your visitors will turn into repeat visitors, subscribers and look towards you as an authority in your field.
AsDarren Rowse from Problogger mentioned- “Building blogs is like building muscles—in order for them to grow you need to use them.”
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