Avoid Your Business Blog From Failing

Starting a business blog has never been easier with WordPress, Blogger, Joomla and others all available to help any aspiring blogger to get started.

However, maintaining a blogging is not easy and it is estimated most new bloggers will fail within 90 days.

There are a number of reasons for this including the following four:

 

1. The Business Blog Is Not Given Enough Time To Show Results

One of the biggest misconceptions most small businesses believe is that their business blog will automatically yield returns. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Consider blogging to be like an investment in your infrastructure. If you buy a new processing machine it is unlikely to make its cost back for at least a couple of months if not years. Most business leaders think blogging is free and therefore the returns should be almost instantaneous.

The truth is blogging is not free, even if you write the content yourself. The time you spend producing, publishing and promoting your blog post is valuable time which has a cost.

What you need to do is give your business blog time to collect authority. This could be between six to twelve months. It may seem like a long time, but companies who do this can expect to see 97% more inbound links and up to 500% more leads.

 

2. The Content Is Not Appealing To The Audience

Blogging is about distributing knowledge and solutions to your audience. Those businesses who use the platform to just promote themselves will often find their efforts are in vain.

Your visitors, when they first arrive, will not care about your business, products or news. They are there because they have a problem and they want a solution.

Tailor your content so that it is all about your customer. Discover what problems they are looking to solve and create posts based on the solutions. Customers who find your solutions effective will want to know more about your brand and this is when you can talk about your business.

 

3. Not Enough Time To Create The Content

This is one of the most common reasons why business blogs fail.

Business owners become too busy to sit down and write their posts. Business blogs which have content published sporadically can perform worse than having no blog at all. However, with the benefits of a blog so high, producing enough content is so important.

To avoid this there are two options: setup a schedule so you are always ahead of your blogging schedule or hire a professional blogger.

If you want to create the content yourself, you have to prepare posts in advance. This allows you to always have content ready to go, even when you are busy.

Hiring a professional blogger is not necessarily expensive and the amount of time and traffic they can generate will give you a significant return in the long run.

 

4. Lack Of Promotion

Your business blog is a content platform and while up to 75% of your traffic may come from search engines, you still need to promote your blog in other ways.

One particular group you need to promote to is your previous visitors. Research has shown 70% of your visitors will not return unless you sign them up to your email list.

Use social media and sign up visitors to your email lists to deliver visitors to your site.

 

Conclusion

Blogging is a perfect method to grow your business but you need to give it time to establish itself and work for you.

Utilise the best practices to create an excellent business blog and drive traffic to your site over the long period.

Website Imagery

An image is a powerful marketing tool whether used online or offline. Yet images on website are often poorly managed by businesses that do not realise images can contribute to sales and SEO. On many business sites, imagery is used only to break up text, which is wasting its potential.

Learn more about how to best employ website imagery here.

 

Why Is Website Imagery So Important?

Website imagery supports your online marketing and sales efforts in numerous ways. A good image can attract your customers to click through to a blog post when it is featured on Facebook. They can also support key ideas you are conveying on a landing page and evoke emotions to increase your conversion rate.

Good image management, including the creation of optimised description, alternative and caption text can support your website’s SEO efforts. This will push your site higher in the rankings and allow your website to be found by more potential clients.

Imagery is therefore more than just a way to break up the monotony of your website’s copy. It is a marketing aid in its own right and one that can improve the results of any marketing activity you undertake.

 

Finding the Right Image For Your Site

One of the most popular sources of images on the web is using stock images or images taken from other sites. Some individuals will consider this under the ‘fair use’ of images but in reality you must have permission to use any image.

Some bloggers who have not realised this have been sued and been closed down as a result. Many of these bloggers used Google to search for images and then directly copied them to place on their blogs.

Google’s image search is a poor choice for image selection. There are questionable copyright issues and there are companies who search for images to find those who have not obtained permission to use an image. These companies then inform the copyright owner and take the offending website owner to court.

Unless you have the facilities (or the budget) to create the images yourself, a good source of website images is using a stock image website. Usually these websites contain thousands of ready-made images for you to download. Some of these images are free, sometimes requiring you to credit the original artist, while others you have to pay for.

The quality of images on these sites is high and there are sometimes options to buy in bulk to save on costs. The only issue is finding an image fit for your particular purpose. For your image you will want to consider several aspects to ensure the image improves your return on marketing activities.

Some of the image properties you may want to look for are:

  • High quality image with a high resolution.
  • A larger image which you can reduce in size (a small image becomes blurry when expanded).
  • An image which is relevant to the content you are attaching it to.
  • Colours that compliment your brand and the rest of the site.
  • If you are using people within your image, you may want to look for happy smiling faces looking into the lens. This has been proven to increase engagement with the picture and page content.

 

Uploading The Image And Best Practices

You will want to place the image in a prominent position on the website. This could be at the top right or left of the website page next to the first paragraph. Alternatively you could place the image in-between the first and second or second and third paragraphs to interrupt the text. For longer pieces (1000-1500 words) it might be best to use two more pictures, placing one at the top and another further down the page.

If you are selling a product online and using images to support that, you should have multiple images taken at different angles.

Choosing the best file type for your image is important. You want to have your image at the best quality but also at the smallest file size. Images which use significant memory take a long time to download when a user visits your page. The average visitor will only wait three seconds for a website to load before abandoning.

Therefore, experiment with the different image types to see which offers you the best combination. For photographic images, often you will find the jpeg format is your best option.

When you upload the image there are a couple of fields which support the basic SEO contribution of the image. The first is the file name or description of the image. Many businesses simply assign an alphanumeric code or simple text string to the image. An image downloaded from a stock image site is likely to have a non-descriptive title.

This should be changed to something which would have meaning to the search engines. For instance a picture of a Dell computer could have the description as “dell-computer.jpg”. It is important to use hyphens (-) rather than underscores (_) as search engines see words connected with underscores as one word.

Next you need to set the alternative text for the image. This is the text which will display should the image not be available to be viewed on the site. Include the keywords in the alternative text you want to rank for. The same practice is applicable to the caption that is attached to your image.

 

Conclusion

Having an image on your website can be beneficial as it provides a method to attract the attention of your reader and improves the uptake of your offer. To make the most of your image you have to ensure it aligns with your website design and the messaging on the given page. To get the SEO benefits from your image you have to tailor the description, caption and alternative text to include keywords you want to rank well for. Doing all of this will ensure your images support your marketing efforts.

 

Action Steps:

  • Go through your website and ensure that your images have the correct labelling for their description, caption and alternative text.
  • Test to see whether your images could use up less memory in other formats.
  • Check the load time of your webpages that include larger images.