When it comes to receiving content marketing advice, you often hear the words, “start your own blog”.

 

After all, according to Hubspot, B2B marketers that use blogs manage to achieve 67 percent more leads than those who don’t. Plus, blogs are also easy and relatively cheap to set up.

 

But one of the toughest aspects of keeping a blog is to get people to read what you have written. When you’ve spent hours crafting what you might believe is your finest blog article, it feels quite frustrating when no one reads it.

 

Now, I have been working in content marketing for quite some time, so I know a thing or two about why people don’t read your blog. 

 

1. You’re Writing About The Wrong Topics

 

Keeping a blog takes a heck of a lot of time and effort. So before you start typing, you need to select topics that are of interest to your target market.

 

If your target market were design agencies, they would be interested in topics about customer retention, finding new clients, maintaining productivity, how to foster a collaborative working environment, and so on. 

 

Whoever your target market is, take the time to know what they like, don’t like, and common issues they might come across.

 

You can also look towards publications that are aimed at your target market for ideas on industry-related topics.

 

Generating new ideas for your blog is a fundamental practice. And it is always better to have loads of topic ideas, then just a few.

 

However, to get the best ROI for your topic ideas, you need to assess whether they will be suitable or not.

 

The last thing you’d want is to have a blog full of generic and boring content. Or even worse, a blog that is totally off-topic.

 

When you are assessing your ideas, get other people in your team involved. It’s good to have someone give you a different perspective.

 

2.  You’re Out of Touch With Your Target Market

 

While topic generation is a task in itself, the other area where a lot of brands fail is how you convey your message to your target market. 

 

For instance, if your target market is marketing professionals working in the sports fitness industry, they won’t want to read content that is filled with technical jargon – that would only be suitable for technical readers.

 

Instead, they would prefer to read content that is easy to digest and explains how can they improve their relationships with consumers and improve ROI from their marketing efforts.

 

One technique that has helped me is through the use of personas. With personas, you list down all the objectives and needs of your target market, and you give it a pretend name.

 

Then, when you go ahead and create your content, you refer back to the persona to ensure you are maintaining the right tone.

 

3.  Your Distribution, Well, It Kind of Sucks

 

Perhaps the biggest area where many content creators fail is content distribution. 

 

Blogging doesn’t end as soon as you hit the publish button, you need to regularly promote your content to your target market.

 

The perfect content distribution strategy starts with knowing where your target market is in the digital space. If you are in the B2B space, then LinkedIn is an excellent place to start. 

 

Used by 83 percent of B2B marketers, LinkedIn provides a tried and tested platform for sharing content with your network and to people in your target market, who are outside your network. 

 

You can share your content in groups and various threads. But when you do share your content, be sure that you are actively and genuinely engaging in discussion and not just sharing a link back to your blog.

 

For B2C marketers, you can take advantage of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

 

Also, as part of your content distribution method, do ensure your blog posts are well optimized for search engines since 95 percent of people only look at the first page of the search results.

 

4.  Aim for Quality, Not Quantity

 

Wrong topic, wrong tone, and poor content distribution are all valid reasons why nobody reads your blog. 

 

But addressing these issues only makes up a small part of your content strategy. When your readers search for content, they want to read something that resolves their problem or it focuses on their wants and needs.

 

And if you can deliver that consistently through high-quality blog content, they will appreciate what you’ve written for them, and they will very likely share your content with their peers, colleagues, and other people within their network.

 

It’s raising brand awareness at its finest.

 

By Author Mayur Mistry,  Wordify.co

 

Featured image: Burst

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