Fact: Very few small business owners who blog, generate anything like the results they could.
Why?
This is the easiest question I have ever answered here! The reason so few bloggers attract the volume of sales, leads or enquiries they should, is that they copy what they see other bloggers doing.
Here’s what I see all day every day: I see bloggers writing a valuable, correctly optimized blog post, before heading off to their preferred social networking sites to try and get the post noticed. Sound familiar? If it does, I hope it’s not because you are using that same approach. If you are, you are missing the most important elements – those rare, additional steps that make all the difference and get people spending money with you!
I was explaining this to a new client of mine yesterday afternoon. She’s intelligent, charismatic and a specialist in her profession. However, like many specialists who use blogging as part of their marketing mix, she had been using the same approach that I outlined above – which failed her (which is why she hired me.)
An hour into our meeting, I showed her what’s possible when you use the right approach. I quickly checked the email account, which gets all the enquiries generated from this blog. In that hour alone, there had been 3 emails, including an enquiry for my services. By the end of business yesterday, that enquiry became a confirmed, new client and I’m really looking forward to helping them achieve bankable results too. I’m not telling you that to impress you, but to impress upon you just what’s possible, when you use the correct strategy.
Of course, there are 2 major problems with trying to achieve success, by copying what you see others doing.
- You might be copying what does not work. It’s easy to see a blog with lots of comments or lots of retweets / facebook “likes” etc – and assume this means the blog is also commercially successful. It doesn’t!All those measurements show you is that there are people who commented there or retweeted the post.It tells you zero about how commercially effective that blog is at generating new business for it’s owner. Many of my clients come to me with large social networks and active blogs that they have worked really hard on, with nothing to show for it. You know what? People will have been copying THEIR approach too, because it looked successful from the outside!
- Not only may you be copying what does not work, but even if you found a blog that was doing things right, the untrained eye will miss it completely.That’s because the many differences between a blog that’s an income generating machine and one that’s not, are extremely subtle.For example, I don’t know much about golf, so when I see a golfer hitting a golf ball, that’s all I see. When a professional golfer sees that same guy hitting that same ball, they can identify exactly what’s happening – what’s failing, what needs removing and what needs to be added to the golfer’s swing etc.
When it comes to marketing, a blog is like any other tool. If used correctly, it can easily become your best source of new, targeted business. However, just like every other marketing tool, only a tiny fraction of small business owners use blogs correctly, for what they want to achieve.
The rest just dabble and as a result, it costs them a fortune in lost business and YEARS in wasted time.
In short, if you want to enjoy better results you need a better strategy. You need an effective strategy that’s been developed for; you, your business, your industry, your unique resources and what you want to achieve. Whatever you elect to do, if you are not currently getting the regular stream of new business from your blog that you deserve, please change course.
As I have said here many times before; if you are rowing your boat in the wrong direction, no matter how hard you row, you will simply end up further and further away from where you want to be. You deserve far better than that!
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