5 Reasons Blogging Hasn’t Got You Clients or Sales Until Now (And What To Do About It) 

If you’re a small business owner, service provider, creative professional, or entrepreneur, you’ll know just how challenging marketing your products or services can be. 

With so many different marketing strategies, social media platforms, and “quick fix” hacks out there, it gets confusing fast. 

I help busy professionals and business owners to streamline their marketing with cornerstone blog content: packages of 10-20 longform, evergreen, conversion-optimised posts designed to form the foundation of your ongoing content marketing strategy, helping you get clients or make sales for years. 

Something I hear a lot, though, is “I’ve already tried blogging for my business and it didn’t work for me.” 

If this resonates with your experience, you’re far from alone. This is such a common experience for people trying to sell products or services online, and I see it across all industries and types of business. 

If this sounds like you, you might be understandably sceptical about my claim that blogging can be a content marketing powerhouse for your business. You don’t want to invest time and money in a new marketing strategy and have nothing to show for it. 

But stay with me. If you’ve tried blogging and it hasn’t worked for your business, there’s a high chance it’s due to one of the factors I’ll cover in this post. 

We’ll look at five of the most common reasons blogging doesn’t translate into leads, sales, or clients for businesses. Then I’ll show you what makes my approach different so you can make an informed choice about whether or not it’s right for you. 

Let’s dive in. 

Five of the Most Common Reasons Business Blogs Don’t Get Results

When someone tells me “I tried blogging and it didn’t work,” that’s a cue for me to get curious and learn more about their experience. 

There are a lot of people who will tell you that you need to blog for your business, but then don’t bother to tell you what you should be writing about or how you can turn your blog into a powerful sales tool. Others will tell you to just keep plugging away at it, and that eventually the leads will flow in. 

I won’t do either of those things. 

Instead, I want to help you get to the bottom of why your efforts haven’t yielded results so far and show you what you can do instead. 

These are five of the most common reasons blogs don’t generate leads or sales for small businesses, service providers, and entrepreneurs. 

Your Content Didn’t Align with Your Sales Goals

When business owners are told they need a blog but not told what they should be posting about, it’s hardly surprising that the resulting content doesn’t align with the goal they set out to achieve: attract leads, sign clients, or make sales. 

“Consistency = results” is perhaps the biggest lie in content marketing. 

Consistency will get you nowhere if you’re not posting the right things. 

A business blog is not a personal journal or diary (no, not even if you’re a solopreneur!) It’s also not a place to dump press releases, company announcements, or general news. 

While a few dedicated fans might find some of this content interesting, it is doing absolutely nothing for your sales and marketing goals. 

Blogging works when it is aligned, consistently and intentionally, with the products or services you’re looking to sell. This means speaking to your ideal customers’ problems and concerns, offering them valuable information or guidance, and positioning your product or service as the ideal solution. 

You Used AI, a Content Mill, or a Low-Cost Writer

(NB: A “content mill,” also known as a content farm, is a company or platform dedicated to rapidly churning out low-cost content at scale. These organisations often operate as middlemen or brokers, connecting clients to writers and pocketing a portion of the client fee. The goals of a content mill are simple: do it fast, do it cheap, and do a lot of it.) 

If “consistency = results” is the biggest lie in content marketing, then the second-biggest is “any content is better than no content.” 

Poor quality content is at least as bad as no content at all, and often worse.

I understand why business owners are tempted to turn to generative AI, content mills, or dirt-cheap writers from platforms like Fiverr. But it’s a false economy, and can actively harm customer trust and engagement as well as damaging your search performance. 

Consumers are increasingly discerning, and if the content on your blog is poor quality or obviously AI-generated, many will worry that this reflects badly on the overall quality of your business, product, or service. 

You Weren’t Writing For Your Ideal Customer

If a business blog is going to generate leads, conversions, and sales, it needs to speak to the needs, concerns, and problems of your ideal customer. 

One of the most common mistakes business owners make is to attempt to write for “everyone.” 

Many assume this will broaden their appeal, giving them a larger base of potential customers. Instead, it tends to dilute and dull their messaging so much that the resulting content is the marketing equivalent of sad beige. 

And anyone who has seen how I dress will understand that beige is NOT my vibe.

Instead, get specific. Figure out exactly who your ideal customer is. Give them a name, if you like. Define their problems and their needs. Then write for that person. 

Another common mistake business owners make is to write for industry peers rather than their ideal customer. 

This can lead to blog content that is overly technical, filled with jargon, or completely inaccessible to anyone outside your industry. When your prospective buyer feels a disconnect between their needs and your content, they will likely assume your business isn’t for them. 

There Was No Clear Call to Action or Next Steps

“People read our blog posts and tell us they find them valuable, but then they don’t buy” is a common complaint I hear from business owners who have tried blogging. 

They’re often confused when I reply, “but did you ask them to?” 

It’s easy to assume that your readers will intuitively understand what you want them to do when they’ve finished reading your content. The reality, though, is often the opposite.

Even the highest quality content won’t convert if you don’t tell your reader what you want them to do next and why. This is why your sales-oriented blog content should always finish with a call to action (CTA). 

Unless you specifically ask them to do something (join your mailing list, book a call, buy your product), they will read the information they came for, close your website, and go on with their day. What a waste of your blog’s potential! 

Always end a blog post with a single, strong, and specific call to action. 

Your Content Was Random Instead of Strategic 

Another problem with that “just be consistent!” advice I hate so much? It can lead business owners to post the first thing that comes to mind because they’re feeling pressured to post content, any content. 

This can lead to disjointed blogs full of random posts without a clear message or strategic purpose. 

Just like the AI-generated and poor quality content we discussed above, this comes from the erroneous belief that “anything is better than nothing.” 

In content marketing, as in so many areas of business, strategy is everything. If a piece of content does not have a clear message and a specific purpose, why is it there?

Blog-Based Content Marketing Works… When It Is Aligned, Strategic, and High-Quality 

Blogging is a proven content marketing method that works. 

However, it’s not as simple as many business owners and entrepreneurs have been led to believe. 

If you’ve been given all the bad advice and had poor results to show for it, I hope you’ll give me a chance to show you what business blogging can be when it’s approached correctly. 

I combine proven content marketing practice with my five-pillar ethical content marketing framework to build you a ground-up package of longform cornerstone content that is designed to help you make sales, attract leads, and close deals for years to come. 

Here’s how I do it: 

Starting with Strategy

When I work with a client to create cornerstone content packages, we start by stepping back and making sure the fundamentals are in place. 

I want to understand everything about your business’s values, story, mission, and ideal customer before I ever put fingers to keyboard. 

This ensures that every single piece of content I produce for you is aligned with your sales goals, your customers’ needs, and the specific challenges you’re looking to address, and written to actually convert. 

Building Trust and Credibility

For your content to convert, it needs to build trust and enhance your credibility in the eyes of your prospective customers. 

One of the best ways to achieve this is to hire a professional (hello!) who can not only create high-quality content but also understands how to craft consistent messaging, address customer needs effectively, and write calls to action that the right people will find irresistible.

You have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom to impart. I’m here to ensure your content correctly positions you as the expert that you are and inspires your prospects to trust you. 

Laying the Foundations for Ongoing Success 

Something I like to make very clear to clients before we start: this is not a “set it and forget it” strategy. 

My cornerstone content offer will require a small ongoing time investment from you to use the blog I build for you to its full potential to hit your marketing and sales goals. (Or a small ongoing financial investment, if you prefer to outsource the ongoing processes to me or somebody else.) 

What it is, though, is a huge time-saver that takes the guesswork out of what to post, hands off the longform writing to an expert, and gives you a road-map for exactly what to do next. 

Most importantly, it works. 

Cornerstone content is foundational. It contains evergreen messaging you can reuse and build on again and again. 

Let Me Make Your Blog Work for You

If you’ve tried blogging before and been disappointed by the results, I completely understand why you’d be hesitant to try again. 

I hope this article has given you some useful context for why blogging may not have yielded leads, conversions, and sales for you in the past. Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve made any of the mistakes I discussed in this post–you’re in very good company! (Yes, I made many of them myself earlier in my business career.) 

I want to show you that there is a better way. 

I want to give you back all those hours you’ve been spending on your marketing so you can do what matters to you: running your business, serving your clients, or spending time with your loved ones. 

If anything I shared in this post resonated with you, I’d love to take it from here and build you a business blog that actually does what you need it to do. 

When you hire me for a cornerstone content package, I’ll make sure:

✔️ Every post reflects your voice and values
✔️ Every word earns its place by leading your ideal customers towards a purchase
✔️ You understand how to keep getting value out of your content and a return on your investment for years to come. 

And, because I only take on a small number of clients, you’ll get a huge amount of my undivided time and attention. 

Let me help you show up as the expert you are, without the stress of not knowing whether or not your content will get the job done.

→ Let’s talk–book a free discovery call to get started.