5 Reasons Why Your Blog is Not Attracting Clients

Blogging is intensive, on-going, and ideally creative. Every article keeps the site going with content for readers, like a new chapter in a book with each post. However, despite some of the best writing, many blogs fail because their authors and the companies that run them do things that drive readers away instead of attracting clients. As a result, poorly-received sites end up dying on the vine from a lack of attention and a lack of readership. This result often frustrates a company trying to develop an online presence, causing them to give up early instead of rectifying the situation.

Typical Blog Mistakes to Avoid

If a blog doesn’t seem to be attracting clients and the desired readership, then it’s time to examine what’s not working before nuking the site altogether. Here are some of the reasons that many blogs miss and end up driving people away with:

1. Attracting Clients the Wrong Way – A blog only works right for a business when it brings in the right readers. While it could attract all sorts of clients, the blog needs to be designed to bring in the right ones that make the business grow properly. As a result, the blog manager needs to make sure the messaging is attracting the right type of readers and the targeted market the business needs, not the gross masses.

2. The Information is Stagnant – Successful blogs gain their advantage because they generate new information that people want to read. A blog that isn’t producing anything new becomes stale very quickly. Even further, search engines are rating sites based on their viable content versus just SEO tags. They want to see dynamic content on sites, which equates to regularly renewed material when meta-crawled and checked by the search engine regularly. As a result, a stale blog is going to drop in the rankings very quickly without new material.

3. The Content has no Zip – A blog can have the most technical, detailed content, but if it has no zip or charisma, then it’s a waste of time. Instead, most readers will just consider the material boring. That’s a death-knell for a blog. This needs to be reversed quickly, and it takes studying successful blogs then do so. Many active blogs with lots of readers combine multiple forms of content with writing, images, and video. They also make it a very interactive experience versus just a flat, newspaper reporting approach.

4. The Writing is Poor – At the end of the day, a blog rises or falls based on its writing. Even some of the most basic issues can kill off a blog quickly, and they are entirely preventable. Grammar, good writing, structure, and writing flow all matter. If the blog posts are disjointed, suffering from spelling and basic grammar errors, missing structure and more, then readers will get annoyed quickly. And that’s not conducive with attracting clients.

5. The Blog is Updated Irregularly– Readers like schedules. They want to be able to go back to a blog and see an update on a regular schedule, either daily, every few days, or weekly. By sticking to a schedule and staying on it as much as possible, a business can hold onto readers the same way old radio shows used to hold onto listeners. People like to hear what the next chapter is or read what the next idea may be. It carries readers from day to day; recurring information on schedule is the reason why newspapers still exist in the modern age of digital information.

“Folks don’t post often enough and, worst, they post irregularly. People need to often enough to build up a rhythm….Some post too often, the opposite of the first extreme. It becomes more than what an audience wants, overwhelming them.” - Michael Hyatt, Platform University.  

Michael Hyatt takes his own spin on blogging mistakes and sums them up in three points. The takeaway is that successful bloggers find the right balance in blog posting. Reaching a consistent rhythm of production with digestible blog posts is far more effective than posting everyday or writing War and Peace on each post.

Understanding the Mission

Attracting clients with a blog involves far more just posting up articles every once in a while or posting a picture here or there. It’s more like running a TV soap opera. There needs to be a plot, a recurring theme, a cast of characters (the company employees and customers), and a good production schedule. There may even be isolated episode postings and guest characters in the form of one-time posting writers and so on. However, the goal is still to keep the folks coming back.

See the Forest for the Trees

One of the best ways of attracting clients virtually with a blog involves looking at the online project from a higher level. Using an overall strategy plan can help provide a road map for companies getting started with a blog platform. By mapping out the overall message to continue attracting clients with, along with topics for each month, week and day on a calendar what seems like a huge task to keep going can be managed one day at a time. This approach of blog production involves using an overall map or global view to gain a top-down perspective as well as a salami-slicing approach for the daily perspective (i.e. you can’t eat a full tube of salami, but slice-by-slice it can be consumed easily).

The role of blog production and attracting clients through it shouldn’t be saddled on one person either. The far more productive approach is to have one manager coordinating the project with a stable of writers producing the actual content on a regular schedule. The writers can either be in-house or outsourced, but they should be vetted and tested to make sure they produce quality material timely and in the same style as the rest of the team.

Companies can’t go chintzy if they want their blog to be successful. A sufficient amount of resources and support need to be provided to make the project work on an ongoing basis. Assuming it’s a one-time campaign is a mistake. Working blogs that bring customers in function as ongoing extensions of a company’s brand and marketing.

Points to Remember

Using a blog as a marketing tool for attracting clients is an expertise developed over time. There’s a finesse involved with a successful blog operation, running like a fine-tuned engine. Attracting clients is always a challenge, and in the virtual world it’s no different.

People have to be compelled to visit and keep returning to a blog website. So with good content, a scheduled release of material, good writing, and a sense of entertainment in the presentation, a blog can break through the masses and develop a following. And hopefully, if everything lines up just right, the blog popularity just might go viral and become real popular, attracting clients, and being shared from person to person. That’s when real blog success happens.

How would you go about making a blog effective at attracting clients?

Add your thoughts in the comments.