Warning: You’re losing customers and fans right now because your blog content isn’t converting as well as it should.

Here’s a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to make, publish and market blog content that will convert more visitors into buyers and brand promoters.

Why is the Blog Content Creation Process So Important?

Great blog content – the words, pictures, sounds and videos that you present to your blog visitors – makes your business or organization more successful in at least the following ways:

1. It impels your target audience to buy from you and to recommend your business to others.
2. It provides search engines with a fresh batch of original stuff for their spiders to feed on, which means that more people will find your blog in search results.
3. It establishes your brand more strongly.
4. It helps you develop relationships of trust with people. After all, you do business with people, not businesses.
5. It leverages the emerging social Web. Because it’s on a blog and not in a white paper or press release, it invites immediate personal feedback and shows people you’re approachable and willing to listen.

In short, successful blog content rewards you and your business forever.

So you’ve got to know how to create it the right way.

Want to make your blog’s articles much more compelling and valuable while saving time and money?

Here’s a five-step method that has worked well for my consulting clients.

• Step 1: Envision.
• Step 2: Evaluate.
• Step 3: Plan.
• Step 4: Work.
• Step 5: Review.

Let’s get into each step in more detail.

Step 1: Envision your future blog content and its awesomeness.

Just imagine for a minute that you’re Po, the Kung Fu Panda, basking in a sublime vision of your pure awesomeness. Bask in it … ah yes … okay, that’s long enough.

That totally raging awesomeness springs from a single source: your blog’s carefully crafted connection to its target audience.

I went to bed at 4 AM last night, er, this morning. I’m still a bit bleary.

Why? I was up late working on some things for blog consulting clients.

It’s not fun but that’s what you gotta do sometimes to make sure your blogging efforts yield good fruit.

Here are 13 ideas to help you sleep better (and, I hope, longer) at night knowing your blog is doing what it should.

1. Keep your blog content churning out regularly. Miss a beat and you’ll lose some winks. Get your posts published or scheduled for publication before you’ve been awake one hour. That way you can bask the rest of the day. I’ve lost more sleep from this one than I can shake a very large stick at.
2. Set clear goals for your blog in at least the following areas: content, design, community, traffic, subscribers, search presence, social presence, conversion and value. Drill down farther if you like, but at least have long-term (say, 60-month and 12-month) goals and short-term (say, 30-day, 7-day or even daily) goals in these nine key areas. If you don’t know where you want to go, the pointlessness will drive you nuts at night.

Through Tuesday, July 7, I’m offering my Total Blog Inspection service package for $77 (normally $297).

Within 72 hours of your purchase, you’ll receive:

• A complete 130-point appraisal of your blog’s content, design, community, traffic, subscribers, search presence (SEO), social presence, conversion and value
• A written report in PDF format with my best tips and recommendations for the improvement of each aspect of your blog, delivered by email
• A 10-minute video screencast that lets you watch my computer screen as I visit your blog and give you specific advice to enhance the written report; I’ll send you a private link by email so you can view/download it

Have you ever been frustrated by your blog writing? By your inability (as you see it) to create compelling content? By the difficulty of coming up with ways to make your blog’s content more effective for your business or organization?

My friend, I have so been there.

Want to make your blog content better fast?

Here’s a carefully assembled checklist you can use every time you analyze the quality of the words, images and sounds that you publish at your blog.

Blog consultants, social media strategists and anyone who owns or manages a blog should find this useful.

29 Key Aspects of Blog Content

We’ve identified the nine blog improvement types. Now let’s break down blog content evaluation and improvement into 29 key areas:

Blog improvement is a tree whose trunk is vision.

Emerging from the trunk are nine main branches:

1. Blog content improvement – Making your articles, photos, podcasts, videos, etc. better at grabbing your audience’s attention and leaving them constantly satisfied yet hungry for more
2. Blog design improvement – Making your blog look, feel and work better for the people who visit and engage with it
3. Blog community improvement - Building a more vibrant community around your blog
4. Blog traffic improvement – Getting more of the right kind of people to discover your blog, and helping them become its greatest supporters
5. Blog subscribers improvement – Increasing the number and fanaticism of folks who subscribe to your blog’s updates via feeds or email
6. Blog search engine optimization (SEO) improvement – Strengthening your search presence – that is, getting better rankings in major search engines and moving more people through Google/Yahoo!/Bing/etc. searches to your blog
7. Blog social media optimization (SMO) improvement – Working to improve your blog’s presence on various social media, social networking and URL sharing websites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
8. Blog conversion improvement – Moving more blog visitors through the process of becoming customers, ad clickers, or even just avid readers
9. Blog value / return on investment (ROI) improvement – Making your blog more worth the time, money, sweat, tears, etc. for yourself and for those who come to it

No matter what kind of blog it is, it’s got these nine areas to possibly improve. Trust me on that one.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” – Alice
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” – Cheshire Cat
“I don’t much care where …” – Alice
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” – Cheshire Cat

Is most of what you’re doing online pointless?

I had the incredible opportunity to join several of my close friends on a group phone call today. We talked about online marketing strategy and the difference between building a blog/website and building a business.

There was a special synergy that brought at least one of the participants to tears (in a good way).

That call got me thinking about the relative pointlessness or meaningfulness of each marketing activity I do online to promote my consulting business.

Have you ever had trouble getting people to fall in love with your blog?

If you’re wondering how to get an enthusiastic audience to come to your blog over and over, this simple guide is for you.

Rabid means intensely passionate. A rabid fan is worth 100 casual readers. Maybe even 1,000.

Without rabid fans, your blog will fall short of its potential and your business will suffer as a result.

Building a rabid audience is like building a community: it can be hard work, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 1: Create a mouth-foaming object.

In my Blog Community Building guide, I call this an “object of adoration.” It’s the centerpiece at the dining table. It’s the campfire at the campfire. It’s the glistening bowl of Toasty Oh’s, milk splashing in from the sky, in the middle of the cereal box.

It’s something to gather around and talk about. Something to focus on.

Something people can get rabid about.

Welcome to Week 3 of the Visionary Blogging Links series!

Every Friday at Visionary Blogging, I share the best URLs I’ve discovered over the past week that have to do with business blogging or professional blogging in general and blogging/social media strategy in particular (for non-profit organizations, for-profit corporations, entrepreneurs, etc.).

Over time, I’ll add some of the very best links from my Links series to the Resources page (still a bit messy, but I’m working on it!). Bookmark that page and my ever-growing Blog Improvement Tips page for future reference.

You’re welcome to suggest links for this series. Just leave a comment here or contact me directly.