We’ve established in a recent post that blogging is an ideal marketing strategy for businesses that aim to build a presence online by sharing content that is relevant to their target audience. There, we shared three steps that are fundamental to providers of business process outsourcing (BPO) services in the Philippines when choosing the right topics to write on their clients’ business blog.
Knowing your audience, identifying their needs, and defining your core message are essential in building your brand image and ultimately, a solid readership. Many bloggers, however, just tend to write about anything they feel like writing at the moment. While this approach is okay if you’re maintaining a personal brand, going ad hoc just won’t work for a brand that needs careful planning and a concrete roadmap for its publishing practices.
So what are the consequences of refusing to map out your blog topics?
 

•     Inconsistent writing

Setting a voice and scheduling posts come with planning your blog topics. Without wise alignment of your core message and your actual blog entries, there will be inconsistencies not just in the tone but in the overall direction of your content marketing initiative. As a result, your blog posts won’t likely reflect the identity that your brand is trying to build.

 

•     Poor traffic and rankings

As a result of inconsistencies, your web traffic, subscriptions, and search engine optimization (SEO) rankings will suffer. You are essentially blogging to optimize your website for search engine visibility, so you could end up doing the opposite if you publish content that isn’t what your audience is looking for.

 

•     Low conversion rates

A carefully planned blog creates awareness to its audience and leads them to do a purchasing decision by showing how the brand will benefit its customers. If your topics aren’t well mapped out, there’s a low chance of converting readers into paying customers, much less invite them to visit your page.

 
If you look at content marketing as a singing contest, you’d realize how standing out among your competition relies critically on choice. No matter how great of a voice you have, if you choose the wrong song, you’d likely lose to a so-so singer who happened to select the ideal song for his voice type. This is how successful blogging basically goes as well—choose bad topics, or even a poor publishing scheme, and you’d be at risk of getting booted out of the web prominence race.