Hey, it happens.

You start a blog to market your business and at first, all seems well: you crank out a couple posts a week and you manage not to sound too sales-y or full of yourself.

But then the idea machine stops working. Now what?

Or how about this? You’ve been humming along nicely, but your traffic (and your sales) just aren’t growing.

Or this: all your commentors aren’t potential customers at all, but peers. They do what you do.

This is not a problem you can fix with enthusiasm or more posts or more social media presence. These problems occur not because you haven’t got the motions down right, but because the motivation and the motives aren’t right.

To get your head back on straight and get your business blog pulling in hot prospects once again, try this one simple tip.

Write About Your Approach to the Problem You Solve for Your Customers By Telling a Customer Success Story

• Recount how a customer of yours had the problem you solve. Describe it in gory detail so that the prospects who read the post will identify with it so totally they’ll wonder how you snuck inside their heads and stole their thoughts.
• Then paint a glorious picture of that customer’s current success being free of the problem and what benefits that customer of yours is now enjoying as a result of being free from the problem.
• Describe how you solved this problem for the customer by walking through your process if you sell services.
• Describe how your customer solved the problem for themselves by using your product if you sell products.
• Talk about how glad you are that this customer is free of the problem but that you know there are many more people out there with the same problem who don’t realize a solution exists, yet.
• Say that if you (address the reader) knows anyone who wants to be rid of this problem, to send them your way, and provide a link to the contact page.
• KEEP DOING THIS. Write a post like this once a week if you can. Create a category for them called Customer Success Stories. After you build up a catalog of these stories, make the link to that category page prominent on your blog. Treat it like a feature.

The above doesn’t work if you’re trying to be all things to all people, so SPECIALIZE. Choose what problem you’re the solution for and stick with it. It’s highly likely your blog lacks focus because your business lacks focus.

Why This Tactic Works Like Crazy

Why does this tactic work so well? Several reasons:

• You get to sneak in your sales pitch disguised as a story about the customer in a way that doesn’t seem sales-y in the least.
• You can always write about the problem you solve for your customers. The problem never changes, but it keeps happening to new people, so you always have new posts to write. You just can’t run out of material or get writer’s block.
• Your prospect can now easily imagine being in your customer’s place and having those benefits. That gets you closer to a sale.
• You’re engaging in accurate blog SEO without even trying. How? To tell these stories correctly, you will practically have to use the keywords used by your prospects when they search on their problem (people search more on their problems than they search on solutions—because they don’t know what the solutions are, yet!). In fact, if you really want to nail this part, here’s a bonus tip: interview the customer and record it and have it transcribed. That way, you’re using your customer’s exact words, which will likely contain keywords.
• This post has no appeal to your peers, because they probably don’t have the problem and they’ll never be a customer anyway. If you keep writing about stuff that only matters to your customers instead of your peers, your blog will not have comments made by your competitors for your prospects to see and wonder about.

So if you’re feeling a bit stuck in your business blog, remember to make it about the customer, not you. The one simple tip I’ve shared with you here isn’t as easy as it seems if your business lacks focus. Any good business coach will tell you that specializing and narrowing your focus will make you more money. It may not have occurred to them there was an SEO benefit to this, but that’s how I think, so you get more than one angle on this problem.

Just try it: do one post like this a week if you can. If you need to talk to your existing customers to make this happen, then do it. You should be talking to them, anyway, right?

Good luck and let me hear your success stories with this tactic in the comments.