I get asked by a lot of companies as well as bloggers as to ideas on what they should be blogging about. My golden rule, as a tool of Inbound Marketing, is to try to blog about topics that my potential clients might be interested in. As you know, I believe a blog should be an essential component of any social media strategy. Now, since I provide consulting and coaching services to companies as well as sell books to individuals, my target audience is pretty broad. However, I always try to blog to showcase my expertise as well as attract a loyal following by providing resourceful, and hopefully insightful, advice.
I don’t think any of this is earth-shattering information, nor am I alone in this pursuit. However, I see a lot of bloggers, and sometimes even companies, pumping out content that make me scratch my head as to what their objective is. Perhaps it is an issue, brought up in an earlier blog post about asking bloggers to stop blogging and start thinking, of writing skills and/or style. Blogging is an investment of time, and just like everything else in life (and especially in social media), it can become a time suck with no ROI. While every blogger will have a unique audience as well as objective, if you are not getting the volume of website visits or amount of retweets that you would like, ask yourself if you are making 1 of these 6 blog content mistakes:
- Personal Issues – If you are trying to blog about your persona and want to share your life with your readers in hopes that it creates a bond which leads to a friendship, great. But if not, ask yourself what the objective is of sharing your personal life with the world.
- Tools That Only Affect a Small Number of People – A lot of people are blogging about Triberr these days, but considering that it is a tool only used by a small number of bloggers, those that don’t blog might not be interested. Once again, think about your target market.
- Irrelevant Interviews – Hey, I know that as a blogger, it requires time, creativity, and a lot of drive to pump out consistently high quality content. Having guest blog posts and interviewing others is a great way to give yourself a mental break in crowdsourcing content. But the person and or content that you provide in the interview MUST be aligned with your content strategy. If not, it doesn’t serve any purpose and merely dilutes your branding.
- Rebroadcasting the News – This is my pet peeve. Don’t try to imitate Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other major players because you can’t. If Facebook releases a new interface, don’t feel compelled to blog about it unless you are adding some significant value. What can I get from your blog post that I can’t find elsewhere? Same goes with products that YOU might think are cool, but is it relevant to THEM, your target audience?
- Sharing a Video – Congratulations! You just uploaded a great video on YouTube. Don’t just share it in your blog – frame it. Add some value to it by providing some background information or going into more depth about the subject. If you don’t include at least 300 words of text, Google probably won’t consider it resourceful content for SEO anyway….
- A Trite Reflection and Then Asking for a Comment – I get it when you ask questions at the end of blog posts in order to gather engagement. But if you’re going to ask a question, at least give the reader some content! Now, Seth Godin is someone who can pack a LOT of punch into a small blog post. Unless you can do the same, don’t offer just trite reflections followed by a “What do you think?” It’s your blog, not Facebook! The less resourceful of content that you provide to your target audience, the more they will tune you out.
This is my idea on how I see blogging – what’s your take on the mistakes that bloggers make? Or do you completely disagree with me? Come on – speak up!
