Blog Marketing
Simple Strategies to Help You Promote Your Blog Online
Many webmasters believe that if you build a website, it’s all it takes to have visitors and make money online. Well, it’s not enough to say the least. You need to tell the world about it, not just your close friends or relatives. Many bloggers sadly think pretty much the same way. This is far away from the truth.
Even if you create a decent blog and submit it to blog directories, it’s not enough if you want to have a successful blog that makes you money. Blog search engines and directories can bring you some traffic while the blogging industry is not overcrowded (yet about 25% to 30% of web users read blogs), but as more blogs appear and are submitted to directories, your chances to promote a blog diminishes.
So is your blog doomed?
Not if you look into other ways to advertise your blog besides blog search engines.
A blog is like a website, except it allows visitors to subscribe and receive updates into their RSS readers. But the promotion methods for blogs can be just the same as for any website. So let’s look at the basic ways you can use to market your blog on the internet.
Blog Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is one of the main reasons why so many marketers start a blog. It’s because search engines visit blogs very often, simply because they tend to be updates often. When they visit blogs more often than a regular website, there are more chances that new updated content will be indexed sooner. Another reason why SEO is good for blogging is that search engines see blogs as valuable content producers. Blogs are fresh, constantly updated, build communities around and are useful to visitors. So search engines rank blogs higher in the SERP’s many times.
Inbound Link Building for Blogs
Inbound links are good not only because they allow you to rank higher in the search engine results pages, but also because they bring you quality traffic directly. There are few ways to generate links to your blog:
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Blog Link Exchanges – This is very popular method among bloggers. You place a link on every page of your blog to your partner and they place a link to your blog on their blog pages. You could also place a link on one of your pages in blog archives simply by editing one or another archive. In exchange you could ask your partners to do the same. This way, you get Google PR and also traffic, so you both benefit.
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Article Writing – Writing articles is a good way to get one way inbound links and drive traffic at the same time to your blog. By writing articles you get links and you rank higher in the SERP’s. You also build credibility as the expert in your field. Another reason to write articles is to do article link exchanges. You write an article about some topic. Contact another article writer in similar niche. Ask them to include a link in their article to your blog and say that you’ll do the same. If they agree, you both are promoting your own articles with links to each others blogs or sites. This can give you a great boost in traffic and rankings.
- Build Someone’s Content for Links – If you’re on a budget, you could contact a blogger in a similar niche like yours and offer them free content in exchange for a link. If you know a lot about the topic these bloggers are blogging about, you can offer them to build content for them for free. All you could ask is a link to your own blog. Of course you should do this if you have enough time to manage your own and someone else’s blog. Some bloggers might not agree, because they want to represent their own point of view in their postings. But many companies that need blog just to get into the SERPs might freely agree with you or even pay you for doing that.
Of course, another free way to get quality inbound links is to simply provide useful content to your visitors. If you have a blog about weight loss, you could offer a free BMI calculator or any other useful tool. If you have a site about mortgages, you could offer a mortgage calculator. If you seek to give something useful and valuable to your visitors for free, you can easily expect people to link to your blog.
Pay Per Click Blog Marketing
If you have a budget to promote your blog, you can simply buy targeted traffic on PPC search engines. You could pay for a traffic and sell them a product or service on your blog. Or you could pay for traffic just to build a subscribers base and expect that in the future this traffic will pay you off. If visitors visit your blog by clicking on a link on search engine and subscribe to it, later they might become your loyal readers and buy from you.
Blog Email Marketing
Email marketing is powerful method of driving instant traffic to your site. You could find ezine owners or email lists for rent and buy a promotion to your blog. If you offer something valuable on your blog, you might expect quite huge percent of people to go to your blog and subscribe to receive further updates. Email marketing is still very cheap advertising media so you might spend few dollars and get double that in return in a long-term.
Lastly you could pay someone to manage the whole blog marketing campaign for you so you could spend more time building your content or testing some marketing strategies.
Summing Up
Blog marketing is almost exactly the same as website marketing. You can think of any new ideas to market your blog. One thing you need to remember is that it’s not enough to build a blog and wait for the traffic to start knocking your door.
You need to spend time and some money too if you want to successfully market your blog and receive decent traffic from search engines or other sources. If you take your blog seriously and won’t be afraid to work hard on it, after some time you can expect to make nice money from your blog.