Why isn't my blog bringing in customers? It's missing one of these 4 things #ContentMarketing #AISearch #SEO #SmallBusiness

Blog posts are by far the most effective form of marketing we do for our clients. However, when I mention this to businesses, one of the most common responses I get is, "Oh, we're already doing blogs." I then will typically ask how effective are they? Are they helping you show up and get recommended when people are searching for your product or services? And the answer is almost always either "I don't know" or "no." And that's because there are four things your blog post needs to do, and if it doesn't do all four of them, they're absolutely useless. First, it needs to be targeting a term that people were more often these days AI is actually searching for. If no one's searching for this information, no one's going to find it. And that term should be right at the front of the title of the article. Second, it needs to be something that people or AI would search for when they're interested in purchasing your product or service. Because, of course, the goal is not to get more traffic. It gets to get more customers. You need to be able to position your brand product or service as the solution in the opening paragraph and at least one other point throughout the article. If you can't do that naturally, it's not a topic worth writing on. Three, it needs to be a topic that you can actually rank for. If companies that are ten times your size or a hundred times your size are already writing content on this exact topic, then you probably want to get a little more specific. Try adding a modifier like a location or a demographic or a use case. And the fourth one is the hardest one to get right, but it needs to be written in a way that AI actually wants to cite the article. Now, one side note before you get into that, assuming you're using AI to write the article, which you probably should be. You probably also want the article to sound like something you would have written. Most brands prefer not to have some cringe AI slap on their website. After personally spending over a thousand hours working on this process, I can say that's the hardest part to get right. But I covered that in my video called How to Get AI to Talk Like a Normal F in Person. For now, let's just talk about how to get cited. You want to write in simple, self-contained sentences with no more than one idea per sentence. Each heading throughout the article should include one implicit or explicit question, and the first sentence following that heading should directly answer that question. And then after answering the question, you should follow it up with one to three facts supporting that answer. And you should link to the source of that information. When you're listing items, use bullet points. When you're making comparisons, use tables. The real reason blog posts are so effective, other than being the number one cited source by AI models, is that almost no one is doing all four of these well.