You have yourself a well built website, filled it with content, and you’ve been online for months but not much seems to be happening. Your blog is an important tool especially if you are a business. It can cut large amounts of work and save money by providing a place for up to date information. Here’s the top 7 reasons your blog may fail to perform.

1. You Have No Blueprint - Be sure to have a sole purpose when you create your blog. If you still don’t have one months in then its time to reevaluate what you what the website to do for you. After setting goals for the website, move into keeping on track. A steady work flow will ensure that people can count on the website to produce.

2. No Use Of Social Media - Branch out to various outlets to make your site known. If you have a defined market you will find that relevant websites drive much better traffic, consistently. I would take 350 primed users compared to 1,000 random hits any day. Get involved on Twitter, Digg, FaceBook, and the millions of others to start branding yourself or your company. Social media marketing is powerful already and it will continue to grow as the online world becomes more prevalent.

3. You Need The Right Audience - Before you worry about what an audience will like, you need to get one. Demographics have been used forever for a reason, they work. Being able to know how old, what gender, location, and much more can be very useful when marketing your brand. Once you have built this audience, you have an army of targeted traffic to play with.

4. Site Performance - People on the internet are whinny babies. With today’s high speed internet people don’t want to wait for crap, not even pictures of what you ate for dinner. They want everything literally at their fingertips and in an easy to follow fashion. Another bad idea is to have more ads than content on your pages… just another rule of thumb. Try to keep your page loads snappy and install WP Super Cache if your on WordPress. If you don’t use WordPress, quit blogging.

5. Features Are Not Up To Date - Stay up to date on certain trends within web design. Keep your website looking fresh with new features that take advantage of advanced scripting and browser capabilities. They can not only add functionality, but cut down load times. Keep in mind that people like to think they have something exclusive.

6. Your Not In It To Win It - Your website is going to require commitment to sustain growth. For real, your website is never, ever going to be finished. And if you are thinking of doing a website full time for your source of income, this rule goes doubly for you. This does not mean that you need to post 40 pieces a week to your site. Not giving anything new back to your visitors will leave them feeling either two ways: 1) They leave feeling like there’s no point in returning as the website has not been updated in months. 2) You have built a large audience and your content flow is normally consistent and high in quality. Your readers could be the addictive type that visits daily if not hourly (lol) to see if there is anything new. While this is a great feat, you need to be careful. If you wait to long people may think you are going dorment.

7. Your Not Benefitting From Your Competition - Your competition is a great source of information! Lets be real people, you don’t think anyone looks at your site for ideas? So, why not look around the web and see whats up in your industry. Your all preaching to the same crowd so don’t let your competition become more appealing.