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.

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.

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.

1. Imagine a person.
2. Think of a problem she has that you can solve.
3. Publish the solution at your blog.
4. Invite her to share your solution with others.
5. Reward her for doing so.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 forever.

Step-by-step tips on this topic next week.

Which step is the hardest for you?

Last week I surprised you with a $750 blog consulting contest here at Visionary Blogging.

The prize: a $250 blog consulting package to boost any professional blog, including:

• A 130-point blog inspection in PDF format
• A video screencast with blogging tips
• A 30-minute phone consultation to discuss blogging strategy

Entry was simple. All you had to do was answer my question, “How can I help you?”

Winners were to be selected randomly from among all entrants.

I promised you results today. Here they are.

Welcome to the Visionary Blogging Links series!

What is The Visionary Blogging Links Series?

Every Friday here at Visionary Blogging, I’ll 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.

I promise to only share links of the highest quality, and never more than 10 per week. You deserve the cream of the cream.

Since today is the second Friday of 2009, we’ll call this week’s edition “Weeks 1-2.”

By next week I’ll create a centralized page where we can keep track of all the links throughout the year and have them organized for maximum usefulness.