Your website is important, so driving traffic to it via blog marketing is a vital part of your success. Marketing with a blog is easy once you understand how to draw in an audience. Blog digital marketing is one of the skills that you will learn below. Making your content enjoyable will make marketing blog posts easy.
You can read our previous post on How to Write Catchy Headlines, to learn how to write captivating headlines.
Blog marketing ideas can come from many places, make notes of your great ideas to be used for your blog marketing strategy. Marketing your blog doesn’t have to be a totally manual process. You can use share buttons to increase blog marketing via social media. When you have a trusting and loyal audience, you can leverage your blog for affiliate marketing. Blog affiliate marketing is an excellent source of income for many when their readers make purchases through links within the content.
However, let's look at 6 marketing tips to grow your audience.
Blog
Your blog needs to be set up correctly. This means going through a checklist to make sure that you have everything in good order. It is much harder to do blog marketing or market your website with your blog - if it isn’t set up correctly.
Here are several things to look at:
Check the navigation of your website - can people move around with ease? User experience matters.
Do you have easy to find sharing buttons?
Is your website responsive and loads quickly?
Contribute
As part of your blog marketing strategy, you should be considering contributing content to other media outlets and bloggers. Not only will this increase your Domain Authority, but it will get your business name out there more often.
Identify a range of blogs and websites that are in the same niche, and pitch an idea to them. If you aren’t sure if a site accepts guest posts, then email them in advance to find out. Cold pitching can come off as rude.
Tailored Content
If you are writing for everyone - you are writing for no one. Your blog can be a driving force for your products and service sales. A blog for content marketing purposes should be written for your audience. Use your analytics for your website and social media to build a profile of your audience.
Once you have identified your audience, you will know what you can do to provide them with exciting and useful content.
Make Sharing Easy
The more people that share your content, the more eyes it will get. The more eyes on it, the more likely new readers are going to find you. Making your content easy to share, by having easy to see and easy to use social media buttons will pay-off.
You can encourage sharing by giving less sharing options. The paradox of choice can mean people don’t choose anything. So give them less to choose from, and they are more likely to click ‘share’.
Hide the share count. Social share counters look impressive when the numbers are significant, and often people want to get in on the action. If they are low, however, then people might consider this negative social proof. Meaning they won’t share because others haven’t - even if they like the content.
A Click to Tweet button within the content makes it fast for people to share a single thought from the post they agree with. They are also easy to see and use.
Promotion
Your blog posts won’t promote themselves. You have to put the work in after you have created the content. You should put a lot of effort into sharing your blog content yourself, but it pays to use a tool like You + Social from tedbree.com. Often tools will give you the most significant insight into opportunities and maximizes your reach and visibility.
Have a promotion checklist for your blog marketing to make sure that you are doing what you can to increase visibility.
Headline - have you written a catchy headline?
Metadata - is your metadata description informative and short?
Have you included supporting links where appropriate?
Promotion list:
Have you got an email list running, does your post automatically go to subscribers?
- Share on your social media channels,
- on your social bookmarking websites and
- on your niche bookmarking sites
When sharing to social media tag the writers of posts you have mentioned.
Bookmarking websites are sites that users share their content to increase brand awareness and increase reach. They can help your site get indexed more quickly and often, an SEO company will use this as part of their blog marketing strategy.
Pop-ups
It doesn’t matter if you love them or not, pop-ups can do wonders for growing your audience. There are many funnel and email marketing tools that can help you to automate the process.
To encourage those sign-ups, offer your readers something free in exchange for their email address. A PDF guide, a list, a workbook - something valuable enough to exchange contact details for.
Make the sign-up fast and easy. Stick to GDPR guidelines with an opt-in, and strategically place sign-up boxes.
After you have been working on the blog marketing for some time, you will find what works for you and your readers, and can then capitalize on that. Doubling down your efforts where it counts.
In summary, always make decisions based on the data you have access to, and write for your readers.
