7 Blog Strategy and Creation Mistakes to Avoid Archives

A blog is the most powerful marketing tool. You can reach millions of people by just putting up high-quality content on your blog. A blog does a lot, such as establishing the voice and tone of the business, as well as displaying the personality and core values of the overall brand. A blog is one of the easiest ways towards building and sustaining a solid relationship, especially nowadays, that people would rather work with those they can trust. Blogs, if created with SEO in mind on a consistent basis, can significantly garner much stronger search engine results.

Using the right strategy, a blog campaign can also speak to various prospects in the inbound sales funnel-those who are looking to be educated to those ready to buy. What a lot of people don’t realize is that blogging is for the long term, and a visionary leader would understand the value of a strong blog campaign. A quality blog is one that would build brand awareness and search results over the next years versus dumping thousands into a paid search campaign for short-term benefits. Although some brands rely on the strength of Google ads and Facebook advertising, nothing will create a brand’s authority stronger than optimal content marketing. This is where many agencies make mistakes. They tend to focus more on products and services without adding some emotion or personality to the strategy. This piece would focus on some of the common blog strategy and creation mistakes to avoid.

Not carrying out 3 layers of research: Not carrying out a proper analysis before a campaign is one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make. There are 3 types of research that should be carried out before a word is typed. They include the following:
Overall market analysis
Target audience analysis
Traditional competitive research
Overall market analysis: This has to do with getting an overall view of your market, which includes its size, profitability, distribution channels, trends and growth rate. You don’t require a lot of energy to get this done, as compared to the other types of market analysis. One way of getting this done is by doing a “quick search of *industry* market analysis 2019”, and you’d get a lot of reputable sources to have an overall snapshot of this information. You can also make use of this data in blogs for research purpose.
Target analysis: This involves getting some crucial questions answered, by asking the key and important players of a business or industry. The purpose of doing this is to get to know your target audience more. You can gather information from everyone, including the CEO to CMO and down to the sales reps. The purpose of asking questions from various people is to get a wide range of various answers. This is the only way you can help a business further refine their target audience, and provide more value than the blog itself. Some of the information you should seek for when interviewing people include the following:
What questions are they asking online? This includes the questions asked on social media platforms, forums and so on.
What’s the income bracket of your target audience?
What’s their buying habits?
What type of services and products are they using that you can replace or improve on?

Getting this information would help you create various blog topics, that you wouldn’t have explored, if not for the data you gathered from them. One of the ways of doing this is by typing in niche-specific keywords in Quora or Reddit. These platforms would show you loads of questions that your target audience is asking. Your job is to provide answers to their questions or enquiries.

Competitive research: This is the third layer of blog-strategy research. It involves taking snapshots of what your competitors are doing.

Not creating content for various target audiences in various buying stages: You should go online and check out companies within your niche. Check out the content of those that have blogs within your niche
Not knowing your target audience: The first thing you should identify when blogging is your target audience. This may sound strange, but over 50% of bloggers have no idea who they are blogging for. They just put out content for the sake of doing that, with the hope that they get some traffic. However, the question is, how would you produce the right content, when you don’t even know your target audience. The next question you might want to ask is how to identify your audience. You can do this by making use of the resources available on the web. Some of the ones you can benefit from including Google forms, to run surveys by your site visitors. This would help you understand them and also give you an idea of what they expect from your blog.
Not collecting emails from day one: One of the mistakes bloggers make is not collecting the emails of visitors to their blog. Getting the emails of visitors to your website would spare you a lot of stress, especially in this world of incessant Google updates. If you’re worried that requesting for the emails of your visitors may throw them off, you should stop worrying. If you do it the right way, you can get those emails without annoying your users.
Freebies: Everyone likes to get free things. Even the richest people in the world would appreciate any freebies that come their way. Offering freebies to your users such as e-books, podcasts, are a good way of satisfying your users. Ensure your readers realize that the e-book will provide more information than the blog post, and let them know that they’d be getting the e-book for free to your email subscribers.
Media-rich content: You should try to put up contents that would get your readers excited about seeing more from you. Good pictures, videos keep people coming back to your page.

Not promoting your blog posts proactively: Even though good posts would get you some traffic. You still have to promote your blog posts. You can email your subscribers, share on social media and so on.

References

Avoid These 5 Blog Strategy & Creation Mistakes. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/blog-strategy-creation-mistakes/303347/

Das, L. (2019). Avoid These 5 Blog Strategy & Creation Mistakes. Retrieved from https://itechment.com/avoid-these-5-blog-strategy-creation-mistakes/