Blogging is a powerful tool to continually generate free targeted traffic from search engines if you invest time and/or money to do the needful. In our first article on how to create a blog, I started off to explain the basics of blogging for money and influence.
But as soon as you finish setting up your blog and publish your first blog post, the next onerous task is to promote your blog to your target audience. If you ask me, blog promotion is a Herculean task a lot of bloggers continually contend with on a daily basis if you don’t have the hang of it.
For you to succeed in blog marketing, you’ve to develop a plan and strategy and follow it to the letter in order to become successful at it. To get started, you’ve to first ensure that there are high quality blog posts published on your website worth reading, sharing and linking to.
Secondly, you’ve to optimize your blog so that your marketing campaigns and efforts will be minimal or at best result driven. If you research and aim at the right keywords, there is every chance that your promotional efforts will hit its target and bring in ideal prospects, leads and customers to your business.
Blog promotion can be done through paid adverts and free advertising methods. While free blog promotion is not entirely gratis, you’ve to spend quality time and energy to make it work. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
SEO is twofold i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On page SEO are activities you execute on your blog website to make it search engine friendly and highly findable for your target keywords related to your business, products or services.
This involves having your search query in blog post title, meta description, body of content, interlinking related blog posts and web pages, using LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and so on.
On the other hand, off page SEO strategies are digital marketing campaigns and content distribution efforts you do outside of your website in order to build backlinks and bring targeted traffic to your blog on a regular basis.
This could include guest posting, content marketing, blog commenting, video marketing, social media marketing, etc. The essence is to build authority, trust, popularity, credibility and expertise around your business blog, create brand awareness and ultimately attract ideal prospects, leads and customers in the long run.
With that being said, let’s go through some of the best ways to promote your blog and maximize your return on investment assuming you have stellar content already published on your blog.
Guest Posting
Guest blogging is a strategic method of creating brand awareness and building backlinks to your site by publishing content on other blog websites. The first step is to research and find blogs and websites with similar themed topics like yours and proposing guest post to the blogger or owner of the site.
If approved and accepted, you’ll publish your content on the blogger’s blog and then have the opportunity to include an author bio where you’ll embed an anchor text link to your blog for targeted traffic.
The greatest challenge of guest posting is getting accepted by bloggers who own the sites where you want to be featured. Successful bloggers hardly rub shoulders with upcoming bloggers. But you can increase your chances of getting approved by doing the following:
-Read and familiarize yourself with the blog you want to write for before cold pitching. You’ve to dig deep into the archives to read, learn and know what content has been published. This will help you to spot content gaps to fill and get quick approval.
-Be active at the blog comments section of your desired blog in order to familiarize yourself with the blogger through constant interaction. It’s easier to relate with a friend than a stranger.
Content Marketing
To start with, “What is content marketing?” It’s simply the planning, preparation, creation, distribution and marketing of content to an intended audience in order to attract qualified prospects, leads and customers to a business website.
Marketing content successfully on the internet to a target audience can be executed on various platforms where you believe your potential leads congregate. And the best way to succeed with inbound marketing is creating high quality content both on your blog and outside of your blog.
Successful content marketing starts with good keyword research to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to focus on. You can also do competitor content analysis to discover gaps to further cover and write SEO articles to address immediately.
You can diversify your content distribution via videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, audio, infographics, blog posts, etc. The most important factor to get the desired result is the quality of your content which will help you to generate engagement.
Having a good handle on content marketing and guest blogging can be of immense value to your business bottom line. The best you can do is to master different methods of promoting your blog at scale one at a time.
Personally, I started with content marketing and gravitated to guest posting before attempting other ways to promote a blog when I was actively advertising my freelance writing services.
List Building
If you want to ease your blog promotion efforts, you should start building an email list of subscribers as early as possible. All you need to build an email list of subscribers from scratch is to sign up with a reputable email service provider (ESP).
ESPs are a dime a dozen on the internet but GetResponse email marketing software have all the features you need to get started including autoresponder, broadcast capability, automation tools, just to mention a few.
You can create a lead magnet as quickly as you can from questions your target audience is asking by making use of keyword research tools and websites to discover them. Provide the answers and compile it as a PDF ebook to give away for free.
As soon as you start building your mailing list, you can send your subscribers a link to your new blog post every time you publish one. This is how to promote your blog to a highly targeted readers and maximize your marketing efforts.
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