You’ve probably been told that your company needs a blog.

There’s nothing wrong with this advice if your blog content converts. For example, you write a blog post and at the end you place a newsletter sign up form or a link to a form. If readers click on your form/link and sign up, you can count this as a conversion.

On the flip side, blog content costs your company money if readers don’t engage with your blog, i.e., share posts on social media.

Content is supposed to help your clients, customers and readers and attract new ones. It’s supposed to engage visitors, whether it’s through comments or social media. Let’s examine further how your blog content costs your company money.

How Your Blog Content Costs Your Company Money

As a CEO, CFO, Director of Marketing, Entrepreneur, etc., you may not care about a tactic such as blog content, to a certain degree.

You’re focused on keeping your current clients and customers happy and converting new clients and/or customers. This translates into an increase in sales and profits. It may even lead to opening a new business location in several cities, states, and/or countries.

But…

If you have a blog on your website, it’s important that the content not only drive traffic to your website, but drive profits to your company or non-profit’s bottom line.

Blog content that is poorly written and not targeted to your clients and customers is a waste of money. There’s no point of having content on your website if it doesn’t connect with your audience and if it doesn’t convert.

If you’re using the incorrect keywords, your blog won’t convert. Why? Because your target audience aren’t searching the keywords and phrases you think they’re using.

The good news is that blog content can be fixed. How? By writing correct blog content and/or re-purposing blog content that misses the mark. Outlined below are the steps to fix blog content that costs your company money.

How to Fix Blog Content that Costs Your Company Money

1. Write for your clients, customers and readers

If you’re an entrepreneur, ask yourself, “Who is my target market?” The answer may surprise you. In fact, who you think is your target market is most likely incorrect. For example, if you’re a business coach, you may think that you should target all business professionals, but this isn’t true. Do you want to work with a wide variety of people? Probably not. It’s important to spend time thinking about who you want to work with and coach. Maybe you want to coach C-Level women executives. Maybe you want to coach C-Level men. You get the picture. Narrow down your target audience and you’ll discover the blog content for your business.

2. Use long-tail keywords and phrases

Using the wrong keywords and phrases in your blog content costs your company money; therefore, it pays to put yourself in your reader’s shoes.  How? By thinking about the words and phrases they use in a Google, Bing, etc. searches. Use Google Keyword Planner or another keyword tool. Also, see what words your competitors use. How? By reading their blog posts and source codes (if you can).

3. Ask readers what they want and need

Stop beating your head against the wall and go straight to the source: your clients, customers and readers. Either poll or survey them, or write a blog post and ask them to leave a comment. If you publish a newsletter, ask readers to email (set up a special email address) with what’s troubling them or what content they’d like to see on your blog. It pays to go straight to the source.

4. Stop allowing sales people to write blog posts

The sales department should be selling not writing. If you allow sales people to write blog post, then your blog content will cost your company money. Let’s face it; your business needs new clients and/or customers and must keep current clients and/or customers happy. This won’t happen if your sales team is busy writing blog posts. Their job is to build, develop and maintain relationships. This translates into new and recurring business. Someone in your marketing department can write blog content. Or, hire a freelance writer who knows and understand content writing and marketing.

5. Create a blog series

A blog series is a fantastic way to showcase your expertise. For example, if you’re a pediatrician who wants to boost your blog traffic and patient roster, develop a blog series around back-to-school health prevention. For example, kids are prone to the flu, head lice, pink eye, mono, common cold, and all sorts of other nasty illnesses. Your back-to-school health prevention series can teach parents how they can “health proof” their children before they go back to school. After you’ve published your first blog series, create other series. For example, many parents are open to holistic remedies. You could advise moms and dads to give their children ginger tea for an upset stomach. Do you see how you can develop and grow a blog series? Remember to engage readers — answer their comments and emails. Before you know it, you’ll be the go-to expert online and in your city, state, province and country.

Over to you. Did you find some strategies of your own from this post? How did you turn around blog content that cost your company money? Let me know in the comments below.

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