I had a reader just yesterday tell me they had been blogging for almost 3 years with little impact on web traffic, leads, and sales. Having heard this problem what seems to be countless times over the past couple of years, I already knew what her issue was without even looking at her blog:

Bad Titles

As I've explained before on this article at The Sales Lion, the #1 mistake businesses make when starting a blog is they simply do the titles, URLs, and meta descriptions all wrong.

To understand where I'm coming from here, there is a simple test you can try on yourself (and your blog) to see if you've been doing titles properly. Here it is:

If you took just the titles of your blog posts and nothing else, would it be obvious to anyone that knows anything about keywords and SEO what the "keywords goals" for each post were?

In other words, with the reader that emailed me yesterday, I went to her blog and did a quick "title test." Within seconds, my suspicions became reality when I found only 10% or less of her company's blog posts had a title that was keyword driven.

Once again, they were making the mistake of trying to sound witty, or catchy--something that Google and the rest of the search engines hate because they have no idea what that article is therefore talking about--which ends up in poor search engine rankings.

Along with this mistake, I see many business owners and marketing departments fall way short when it comes to maximizing keywords in a title. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about:

• Chevrolet Camaro vs Ford Mustang (Good title because it's a great long tail keyword phrase using Vs)

• Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang: Reviews (Better title because now we've introduced more keyword possibilities)

• Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang: Reviews/Ratings/Comparisons (Best title because now we have multiple keyword phrases we are targeting)

Over the past year, I've had a huge amount of success teaching this concept of blog titles with clients around the globe. Some have experienced 300-400% growth on their blog (and leads/sales) simply because they took their titles to the next level.

So again, don't allow your blog titles to fall short. Catchy and cool phraseology is fine, but only if it does NOT sacrifice results.

I have some extra time in the office today so I'm going to make an offer to all my readers. If you have a blog but it hasn't grown your site's traffic, leads, and sales as you'd hoped (whether you're a small or large business), hit reply to this email and let me know.

Now granted, if you've only been writing content once every few weeks, then you already know your problem--a lack of effort.

But if you've been producing content without fruit and have no idea why, send me a direct link to your blog, I'll look it over, and then get back to you with a short response.(Just hit reply to this email)

Based on my schedule today, I expect only to be able to answer the first 75 responses today, so if I get your response late, it may take me a few days to get back to you.

OK, ball is now in your court.

Marcus

PS: Thanks for all your support everyone. The Sales Lion blog and podcast are growing every day. Speaking opportunities are popping up left and right. The last six months have been surreal--thanks to YOU. I simply can't fully express my gratitude.