People blog for a lot of reasons. I blog here to talk about home business, and so I talk very little about my home life. But other blogs focus entirely on people’s home life. It just depends on who you want reading your blog and what you want them to do.

When you blog to get sales, you want people who are going to buy from you. It doesn’t matter that much if other people read what you write. You need to attract people who will buy from you.

If your blog isn’t acheiving the goals you have for it, you need to figure out why. This is particularly important if you have the traffic, but not the sales. You’ve only figured out a part of the equation if you aren’t making sales.

Selling on a blog does not have to be difficult. While people don’t want to read sales pitches all day, every day on a blog, a well crafted, useful discussion of a product can really get their attention and drive sales.

Take a look at how you’re getting traffic. Is it just natural search engine traffic? Commenting on other blogs? Technorati? Article marketing? How well are these building up your blog in the way you want it to go?

One of the key things you want to remember is that you need to keep things consistent whenever possible. You can’t expect to write an article on cat care and expect it to drive the right kind of traffic to your dog blog. Readers may be animal lovers, but not all cat owners have or want dogs.

You always need to be confident in your online appearance. You can admit to mistakes and hard times, but if you blog about how miserable all of these make you, or how impossible your obstacles are, people aren’t going to have trust in you.

And of course you should focus on what your ideal customer wants. This is the person you are writing for.

Hopefully you have a vision of this person already in your head. But you may find it helpful to write out what you want, so that you have something to refer to on those days when you just aren’t feeling inspired. This is the person you are writing for. This is the person you want to appeal to.

An unfocused blog is simply unlikely to attract a solid audience. Work on your focus by figuring out where it really needs to be. Then write.

Technorati Tags: , , ,