11 Common Mistakes in Blog Marketing (And How to Get Better Results)
More people are consuming blog content than ever before.
Uncover how to optimize your blog by avoiding the 11 most common mistakes in blog marketing.
According to HubSpot, in 2020, blog marketing is among the top 3 forms of content preferred by digital marketing teams.
Content marketing has been a hot topic for many years, and there is no sign that the trend is slowing down.
If you think about it, we are more likely to watch a video, read a blog post, or listen to a podcast rather than click on an ad (not to say you should not do ads; we recommend that, too!).
We are also more likely to Google something, read a blog post, get distracted by other content, end up signing up for a newsletter, and finally, after receiving a few emails, purchasing a product/service.
If you succeed in getting your visitors to consume as many pieces of valuable content as possible, they become more likely to buy from you.
Any business can benefit from content marketing, especially seeing how easy it is to set up a blog on your website.
However, it is getting increasingly harder to grab an audience's attention (and retain it) due to the increased amount of online content.
The key moving forward is to create user-friendly, valuable, informational, inspiring and entertaining content. In short, highly engaging content.
Creating concrete strategies and following proven processes can build a profitable audience within the saturated web.
This blog post will discuss the 11 most common blog writing mistakes and how to fix them. It is time to make the most out of your written content.
Mistake 1: Not Transitioning Your Visitors to the Next Step in the Funnel
The worst thing you can do is pour all your blood, sweat and tears (and money) into blogging and not establish a strategy to profit from your efforts.
You’ve impressed the visitor, and now you have to go for the sales pitch.
Maybe you haven’t created an in-depth marketing funnel, and perhaps you’re not exactly sure how to maximize profitability from blog marketing, and that’s ok. However, you need to put some serious thought into your strategy, especially if your business puts hours and hours into content creation.
One easy way to kickstart your funnel strategy is to start collecting leads with a pop-up, a banner, or a simple form. Many services exist, such as MailChimp, HelloBar, Klaviyo, and ActiveCampaign.
You can continue the relationship from there once you have a lead’s email. If you don’t collect emails, you may never regain their attention and see them return to your website.
If you don’t collect leads, it will be challenging for you to monetize your blog marketing efforts.
Mistake 2: Not Providing Value in Exchange for a Lead
You must collect emails, but what if it’s not working? What if you're getting tons of traffic, and no one fills your pop-ups or subscribes to your newsletter? Your readers will likely never come back to your site.
The best way to get someone to subscribe to your email list is to offer them a valuable freebie in exchange for their email address.
Here are some ideas for free resources:
Discounts
Free trials
Documents
E-books
Guides
Tutorials
Premium access codes
Digital Marketer’s Valuable Lead Magnet
Anything you can think of that is precious for your audience and leads to an email capture will be useful.
The typical business blog mistake here is that by only having a subscription box (or pop-up) and no incentive, your audience will not give you their email (which will translate into a low conversion rate). You have to offer something irresistible and provide content that will make visitors want to receive more emails from you.
For example, I will take Digital Marketer’s lead magnet, which they claim generated 35,859 leads in 60 days (shown below).
In giving them your email, they would give you the “Facebook Ad Template Library,” which is an irresistible offer for marketers that use Facebook Ads.
They knew their target audience wanted to improve their ad results and created an excellent lead magnet.
It worked.
Mistake 3: Not Writing Useful Content for Your Audience
The idea of being a publisher is creating content that entertains, informs or inspires your target audience. Publishers create engaging material to get an audience's attention and then introduce ads to make money.
Many businesses engaging in blog marketing forget the point above, so to succeed in this area, always remember that you must be a publisher FIRST and advertiser SECOND.
Without an audience's attention, you cannot advertise to them. Or at least, you will not have anyone to sell to or profit from.
Suppose you are writing content that is purely promotional or content that isn’t any more valuable than other articles online. In that case, you will NOT get the engagement you need to capture leads.
Here’s the key to creating engaging content:
Understand your target audience so deeply that you know their struggles, pain points, challenges, goals, lifestyle, thinking process, and more.
You can then create content that is unique to them, answers their questions and solves their problems. If you are doing this, you are creating engaging content.
If your business needs support in its content marketing efforts, learn more about our services below.
Mistake 4: Not Using Headlines That Generate Clicks
You’ve spent hours and hours putting together the perfect blog post. You’ve ensured it is valuable and that you offer a good incentive in exchange for their email.
Now, let’s talk about your blog post’s title. It cannot be deprioritized.
The headline of your blog post is the principal element that will help your readers decide if they will read your piece of content. It is as simple as that.
If you spend 8 hours on a blog post, your headline should take over a minute to write.
Do some research on viral posts in your niche and analyze their titles. You can even create a spreadsheet with the top headlines you find online.
The one thing you must be careful with is that when you make your title “click-bait,” the following content needs to deliver said value.
Let’s look at some examples of headlines for your blog posts (replace what’s in the [brackets]):
[#] Powerful [desired result] tips (that actually work)
A step-by-step guide to [desired result]
The one thing that no [industry] expert is going to tell you
The simplest way to [desired result]
[#] common mistakes in [industry] (and how to fix them)
As you can see, you’ve probably run across titles like this (including this post). You can quickly go to other viral posts and make your template.
Mistake 5: Not Introducing Clear Call-To-Actions on Your Blog Posts
If you are not giving your audience guidance and reminding them to complete a specific action, how will they know what to do?
You may think that by providing valuable content, they might check out your products or services.
Wrong.
As far as your reader is concerned, they read your blog post to get a question answered or learn something. They don’t care about your brand unless they’ve encountered your content more than once.
You must let them know there is more to explore and understand regarding your business.
As the term describes, blog marketing is about putting your brand in people’s minds by exposing them to your written content. Make it simple for them by giving them instructions.
You can use the following CTAs:
Make sure to follow us here! (link social media account)
Share this blog post with others that may find it interesting!
Let us know your opinion on this topic in the comments!
Here is another related article we think you may be interested in (and link to it).
Subscribe to receive more content like this one.
If you liked this post, you might also like this one.
If you want to learn more about our products and services, click here!
Here is how our products/services can help you solve this problem.
Examples of Grammarly’s Call-To-Actions
As you can see, there are many examples, and you can have many of these throughout your blog post. Remember not to be over-promotional and stay valuable in your blog post.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to help them find more of your great content by linking to some of your other posts. Make sure it’s related content that’s worthwhile for the reader.
In short, clear call-to-actions are A MUST in blog marketing.
To show you an example of this tip, here’s Grammarly’s blog post.
As you can see above, there is a button “Get Grammarly for free” in the middle of the article.
We also see buttons to share the post on the left; on the right, there’s more valuable content for readers to view.
All of these options are great call-to-actions!
Mistake 6: Not Prioritizing Search Engine Optimization
You do not stand a chance in blogging if no one can find your content.
And yes, most traffic comes from search engines (social media too, which I am hoping you are also taking advantage of).
Search Engine Optimization is an industry by itself, and although it will take you some time to learn all the details, you should, at the very least, know the basics.
If you have not, at the very least, optimized your title, headlines, meta description, and content, then you are fully committing this mistake.
Make sure you learn about this topic to better your blog marketing efforts.
To keep it simple, no one will find your content if your blog post is not discoverable by search engines and adequately indexed.
I increased the traffic to our blog by over 300% by better optimizing our writing. To get you started, here is a post where I explain the most critical elements of SEO.
Mistake 7: Not Doing Keyword Research
Avoiding this mistake right here will save you hours and hours of your time!
Here is the thing, if you are new to content marketing, you have no chance of ranking on popular topics because they will be taken over by the big brands who:
Pour more money into content marketing in a week than most businesses can in a year,
Have such an incredible reputation and authority that anything they write ranks at the top,
Blog posts have been over-optimized for quite some time.
How do you overcome these challenges?
Pick topics for your posts that have a decent amount of traffic but not much competition. These may be topics that are way less popular, but ranking at the top might still give you a decent amount of traffic. Plus, it’s better than wasting time trying to rank for highly competitive keywords.
I recommend tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner or ahrefs for keyword research. These tools can give you an idea of what keywords or topics are less competitive and how much traffic they get. Keep in mind that most of these tools are not 100% accurate.
Moz has a great guide on keyword research; you can find it here.
Book a consultation below if you’d rather we take care of your keyword research and search engine optimization.
Mistake 8: Not Promoting Your Content
I am going to retake a similar example from before.
Let’s say you spent 8 hours writing the perfect blog post. It’s perfect in every way. However, you only spent 30 minutes promoting it on your social media accounts.
In case you haven’t caught the mistake, let me give you another example.
If you are working on a brand new product for one year, do you only promote your product for one month?
No. Right?
Unfortunately, this happens a lot with content marketing. If you’re spending 8 hours writing a piece of content, you should spend at least 8 hours promoting it.
It is not just about posting it once to your social media accounts. You can do so much better!
Here are some ideas on how you can promote your blog post:
Contact other blog writers and ask them to link it in their content (plus, this is good for your SEO), share it, and comment on it.
Repost it on your social media multiple times. Don’t overdo it, but nothing wrong with tweeting it occasionally, even years later.
Take advantage of social media groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Send an email to your audience sharing with them your newest article.
Email people who have shared similar content and ask them to share it.
Put money into Facebook Ads or Google Ads to promote your article.
Link to your newest blog in some of your other blog posts.
This list can go on and on. The point is that you cannot just post it and hope millions find your content without a bit of promotion.
Mistake 9: Not Being Consistent with Your Content
This rule applies to all content marketing tactics and strategies.
The fact is, you need to be consistent. Like anything in life, consistency leads to mastery, and on top of that, algorithms love consistency.
Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn and Youtube love consistency and will reward you for it.
When you become consistent, note how much your engagement and reach go up, and when you stop being consistent, watch how it drops.
Algorithms exist to make you want to post more and more, so they love seeing frequent and consistent posts.
Another reason to be consistent is that if you post once a week, that’s 52 pieces a year, which will beat anyone who only posts two articles a year.
Consistency is vital.
Mistake 10: Not Collaborating with Others
Collaboration is one of the most used techniques for mastering YouTube.
Content creators know there is no easier way to reach a bigger audience than by tapping into someone else’s audience.
The best part? The benefit is mutual. Both parties win.
When it comes to blog marketing, it is the same thing. You need to build relationships with people in the industry and other content creators who talk about similar topics.
These newly built relationships can and will translate into collaborations like guest blogging, sharing content on each other's social media or newsletter, linking to one another, and many others.
The virtual world is just like an everyday business. You need to develop relationships; whoever can build the best relationships will have a massive advantage over everyone else.
Mistake 11: Not Repurposing Your Content
The best content marketers know this, but if you’ve already put so much thought and effort into a piece of content, why not transform it and repurpose it into other formats?
Let’s say you have a winning blog post about ten ways to tie a tie. Here are some ideas on how you can repurpose this content (you can recreate the same content, just with a different format):
Create a video and post it on YouTube.
Design an infographic.
Transform your video into a podcast episode.
Transform your blog post into a lead magnet.
Reshare your video on Facebook, Instagram and other video platforms.
Create a newsletter talking about the same topic.
Print a brochure of your infographic and bring it to a conference.
Share your infographic on Pinterest.
Create an ebook if the blog post is long enough.
As you can see, there are so many ways to use already winning, engaging content into different pieces.
Who knows, maybe your YouTube video will go viral - and you spent no time researching your topic because you had already done so for your blog post.
Different channels will attract different types of people, and as we talked about earlier, this is just another way to get your content into as many eyes and ears as possible.
Conclusion
If you avoid all these mistakes, you are well on your way to greatness!
Blog marketing, and content marketing, for that matter, are not going away any time soon, so if you’re a business trying to create an audience, this is the way to do it.
These steps will help you create a more engaged audience, a loyal clientele, and a profitable business.
Check out our content marketing and SEO services, and if you need help, you can book a free 30-minute consultation with one of our experts!
Who We Are
Noetic Marketer is a full-service digital marketing agency with roots in Ottawa and the GTA. We specialize in creating and optimizing digital marketing campaigns for the higher education, e-commerce, professional services, and contractors industries.
As digital marketers, we strive to find solutions to every company’s lead generation challenges, creating personalized marketing strategies that suit the specific needs of our clients.
