Business blogging is harder than it looks. Business blogging is not like problogging or hobby blogging. With business blogging, your goal is to attract qualified prospects to the blog and through their interactions with you and your content, convert them into leads or paying customers. We get so desperate for any kind of traffic that we often happily accept the wrong crowd and don’t even realize it. That’s understandable: it’s difficult sometimes to understand exactly how the content we create draws the audience it does. It really is cause-and-effect, once you see it.
How do You Know Your Business Blogging is Attracting the Wrong People?
Answer the following questions for yourself:
- Has your traffic gone up, but not your sales or leads?
- Do you get backlash from your audience in the form of comments or unsubscribes when you present an offer?
- Is it clear from your blog’s comments that the majority of the people reading your business blog are not your target customer?
- Are most of your commentors professional peers, rather than target customers?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above, chances are your business blogging is attracting the wrong crowd.
Symptoms You’re Attracting the Wrong People to Your Business Blog
- Your audience consists of freeloaders: people who gobble up all your free content with hardly a word of thanks, but who protest loudly when you offer high-caliber help for money.
- You get a lot of questions in your comments from people looking for free advice, rather than buying your information products or services.
- The majority of your audience communications are with people in your peer group, rather than customers. For example, let’s say you’re a graphic designer and most of your commentors and Twitter followers are other graphic designers. These people are never going to hire you!
Business Blogs are Like Cooking
When you’re cooking and you follow a recipe, you’re going to get whatever the recipe is for. If you have a recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala, you’re not going to end up with Texas Chili. If you’re not getting the results you want, you have to change your recipe. Here are some of the elements which make up your business blogging “recipe”:
- Your main conversion action, content, and placement of this content.
- The visibility of your offer and the nature of your business.
- The content of your blog posts: are you generating desire or satisfying it in your prospects? (Hint: you want to do more of the former and less of the latter.)
- How you use “listening posts” on social networks to attract and send qualified prospects to your blog
- The exact wording of post content as it relates to SEO and monitoring your analytics to make sure you’re on track. Scribe SEO (affiliate link) helps a lot with this, by the way.
Now you have some good starting points on what to look for if you think your business blog might be drawing the wrong folks, and you have some starting points about where to look to make improvements to your business blogging “recipe” so you get the results you expect: more sales from qualified, targeted traffic.
So, what do you think Michael? How can you attract the right people?
Derek that depends on too many factors that are unique for each business to
give a pat answer, but one suggestion is to hang out online where your
customers do instead of your peers.
You know, I think that's some great advice. One of the things I tend to remark on at internet marketing and blog conferences is how all of the consultants go there to pitch their services. What's funny is, everyone has the same services. If you're trying to land consulting deals, you're better off hitting up a car insurance conference. heh.
Exactly. Or any trade show that had NOTHING to do with marketing. Imagine
the gold you could dig up at an RV trade show, or a health products trade
show. Trade shows are gold. I'm probably giving away too much with that one,
but oh well.
I'm still working on bringing the right people to my site. It's an art that I've been trying to master for the past two years. It's all about baby steps.
It's so true, we have to go where are people are. Where people have pain is where we need to be, to help them ease their problems. Time to check out some RV tradeshows.
I almost cried when I read this… really!
I have a legal blog in Mexico.. blogging is not that common yet in Mexico and blogging as a business is even less common. I really enjoy blogging because of all I've learned technology and law-wise.
Now, a lot of my direct traffic is people who will never be customers and that are only looking for free advice. I usually try to help them out.
On the other hand, many people that are subscribed to my newsletter are potential customers, so I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.
Regards from Mexico!
Wow, you are ahead of the curve, that's for sure. The world will catch up.
Even in the U.S., only 8% of lawyers blog.
The tactic is attracting the wrong crowd. This same principal holds true … Does your business card have your blog URL? Twitter handle? …
Attracting the wrong crowd … If this is your market, so be it! But what happens after the World Cup, I wonder?” … Of course, the nature of business
Thanks for sharing this
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