When Blogs Don’t Work

I received a call from a SocialTract prospect last week who was asking about the effectiveness of blogs. Here is how the conversation started.

Joe, two of my competitors are using blogs but I can’t see that it’s helping them in any way.  If blogs don’t work for them, why should I blog?

Here is what we found out about those two blogs:

1. Combined, the two separate blogs had a total of five posts, with the most recent being from two months ago. Takeaway: Blogs don’t work unless they are consistent. Without consistent content you have nothing to share in social networks and nothing for Google to index in their search engines.  If you have a blog and you aren’t at least posting once per week, you won’t see much return. According to these statistics from Hubspot, 70% of small businesses that blog at least twice per week have received direct business from the blog. Only 13% saw business that blogged less than monthly.
2. For the most part, the blog postings were sales related. Takeaway: Blog readers don’t care about your business.  They care about themselves and their needs.  If you aren’t consistently addressing their needs, you’ll have lonely blogs.
3. The blog posts weren’t keyword optimized. Takeaway: Take the post you are reading for example.  Look at the URL…the last part of the URL says blogs-dont-work.  That’s my keyword phrase for this post.  Notice that I also have “blogs don’t work” in the second paragraph of this post.  It’s also in the title of the post. Now, the most important thing about blog posts is that it’s valuable, relevant and compelling content.  BUT, as long as you are doing that, you should be writing for search engines as well.  The two blogs my prospect showed me simply didn’t have a clue about how to optimize for keywords.

There are so many other things that dictate whether or not a blog will work for a contractor or small business.  These are three we caught in five seconds.  Overall takeaway: If you are going to blog, at least use these three best practices.

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