You understand that writing a technology blog for your solutions provider business has benefits. It can increase traffic to your website, establish you as an industry thought leader, and help you keep your edge on the competition. You may have come to realize, however, that blogging isn’t as easy as you originally thought, and your blog isn’t generating the results (read: leads) you had hoped for.

Here are five signs that you probably need some help writing a technology blog and putting the right strategy in place to get results:

1. You can’t think of anything good to write about. Writer’s block is a real problem for a lot of people when faced with blank Word documents on their screens, but it is a problem very few solutions providers should ever have to deal with. Your team interacts with clients every day, listening to them explain their business challenges and asking for solutions to overcome them. Any challenge your clients are facing is a potential blog topic — and if it’s a challenge all of your clients are facing, it’s a great blog topic.
2. You aren’t sure who you are writing to. If you are writing a technology blog about the latest devices and software, using a lot of technical jargon, and trying to work in all of those vocabulary words you learned before you took your college boards, you are probably writing for the wrong audience. Blogs about the technical aspects of your solutions may appeal to other solutions providers, but not necessarily to your clients who work in fields such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing, or hospitality. You need to focus on their businesses and their challenges and write in a way that’s easy for them to understand.
3. You write great content, but no one visits your website to read it. Blog writing, unlike writing for print, requires a specific strategy to be effective. You need to include keywords in the title, blog text, and other online elements that will enable Internet search engines to find and list the blog in search results. It’s also helpful to promote your blogs on social media and to include links in newsletters or emails to direct more traffic back to your website.
4. Your blog doesn’t result in any sales leads. You are creating great content, you are using keywords, site traffic may have also increased, but writing a technology blog never results in any leads for your business. Do your blog posts include calls to action (CTAs)? Without a CTA trigger such as a button readers can click to download an e-book, white paper, or case study related to the blog, readers may just click on another link without indicating interest in a particular solution or leaving contact information.

The Fifth Sign: No Time to Blog

The many other demands of your job may not leave much time to write or manage your business’ blog. A blog that isn’t updated, however, can give website visitors a negative impression of your company. To be effective at attracting visitors and helping your rankings with search engines, your blog needs to be updated regularly. If the last blog post on your website is from a year ago, you probably need help just to make it happen.

There are experienced blog writers who understand your business and the markets or verticals you serve, as well as how to optimize a blog to produce results. If the signs are there, it’s probably time to ask for help.