7 reasons why your business blog isn't converting

So you’re getting traffic to your blog. Great! But what’s the point of these visits if they’re not amassing to anything else? Converting visitors into leads is the next stage of the battle.

Here’s why you’re business blog is failing to convert.

1. You haven’t thought about personas

The reason why your blog is getting hits but nothing more, could be because you’re attracting the wrong people. For instance, your target audience is CTOs, but you’re content provides low-level technical advice, so you’re attracting a junior IT audience.

Alternatively, you’re attracting the right people, but your execution – your style of writing, level of detail, actual content etc. – isn’t suitable. Explaining basic technical terms to a CTO is a bit like explaining the offside rule to David Beckham.

You should always have your personas in mind. If you haven’t created your personas yet, download our B2B persona workbook and template. Each piece of content should target one specific persona.

You should think about personas:

1. As you brainstorm content ideas
2. As you create blog content
3. As you share blog content

(So pretty much all the time!)

2. You deliver nothing but a sales pitch

You’ve attracted visitors to a blog article with an enticing headline, but then it fails to deliver. Instead of offering your wisdom and educating your reader, you’ve given a sales pitch. It’s likely that your reader simply isn’t ready for that.

The inbound marketing philosophy is about providing value to potential customers – moving them down the funnel by offering useful and interesting content. Blog posts are typically the start of the visitor’s journey; directly stating the benefits of your particular company and offering should be reserved for the final decision stage of the journey.

3. You haven’t included a Call To Action (CTA)

No CTA = No action

Pretty obvious right? But so many bloggers fail to provide clear and obvious CTAs that offer good quality content.

You need to have content in place, such as ebooks and whitepapers, to support your blog topics, provide an obvious next destination for your visitors and guide them through the conversion process. CTAs should be prominent on the page, and tactfully worded.

 4. You haven’t formatted for the reader

Nobody likes reading a plain block of text. I know if I land on an article that isn’t broken up and formatted, I’m hitting the back button.

Subheadings, whitespace, bullet points, bolding, images – there are a range of options to break up an article and make it readable.

5. You went OTT

Yes, you should share your knowledge on your blog. But if you cover too much, you won’t leave your visitors wanting more. That’s not to say you should end your post on a cliff-hanger, you just shouldn’t offer everything you’ve got from the outset. More in-depth or advanced information should be saved for ‘gated’ content (ebooks, whitepapers, etc.) where you can collect information through forms to generate leads.

6. You deliver poor User Experience (UX)

Web users expect good UX nowadays, no matter what devices they’re using.

If your website isn’t easy to use, or easy on the eye, across a range of screen sizes, your blog's bounce rate will likely inflame. Of course, this isn’t specific to your blog; the bounce rate across your website will be elevated if the UX is poor. 

7. You divert your visitors away

Supporting your content with links to high quality external content is a recommend practise, but you can be in danger of losing your visitors. Ensure external links open in new tabs so visitors can easily come back to your site. Also, go easy on linking away from your website; include only 2-3 external links in total.

For more information about the inbound marketing methodology, download our free workbook.