How To Skyrocket Your Blogs' Marketing

in #minnowsupport7 years ago (edited)

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First a big thanks to @zneeke for suggesting this idea! If you have a topic that you would like to see as a "Blog Help" post, please let me know in the comments below.


As bloggers, we often occupy every role in the publication process. This process includes writing, editing, design, and marketing. The downside to this is that there are very few people good at all of those things. Luckily, we can learn tricks over time.

I am not a marketer by trade or even education. I'm just a guy who has blogged for fifteen or so years. It's the grind of blogging that pushed me to try and learn something about marketing for the chance to gain exposure to my blog. I by no means know all there is, and anyone who is a marketer by trade, please chime in in the comments below with any tips, tricks, or things I missed.

Plug Your Work

To grow your blog you need to get over the fear of self-promotion. The majority of your visitors will come from referrals of your current readers. If no one reads your blog and you do not promote it around the internet than there is no way the word can get out.

Without self-promotion, we leave it up to the search engines to find our work and rank us. Unless we get above the fold on page one of these sites, it's as good as useless. Even then, search engines only provide about 20% of a blogs' overall traffic due to the visibility issue we just mentioned.

The remaining 80% comes from referrals on sites like Facebook and Twitter. So if you are not "pimping" out your content to friend, family, and strangers online, you are only shooting yourself in the foot. Not every post is a fit for your friends and family on Facebook, but they all are for your blogs' twitter feed.

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Spend a Healthy Chunk Of Time on Marketing

As much as we would like to spend all our time writing and just let the readers flow in, this is not how blogging works. We need to set aside time for marketing and branding our content. It may seem like a lot, but half your time dedicated to blogging should be devoted to marketing.

So, if you set aside 10 hours a week for your blog, five of those need to be for marketing; but don't worry, marketing is not just self-promotion, almost anything you can do to increase your blog's exposure is marketing. Promotion includes replying to comments, sharing your new posts, and networking with other bloggers.

If setting aside half of your dedicated blogging time for marketing endeavors hinders the quality of your content, than dial it back. The first and foremost goal is to create quality content. Without producing our best work, our marketing efforts will only speed up our destruction.

Host Your Dinner Party

Relating your blog to a dinner party is a common theme. You start the conversation and chime in here and there where appropriate. Too much will come off as awkward and too little will come off as snooty. Neither of which is good for your blog and brand.

Nail Down Your Brand

It is a good idea to think about your banding before starting a blog. Think of the niche you aim to fill and think up a good name for your blog. The branding should fit your niche. If not, it would be like going to a dinner party advertised as hosted by you, but, when the guests arrive, it's actually hosted by someone else.

If you already have a blog and did not think about the name beforehand, that is ok. You will have a harder time establishing your blog name within a niche, but it is not impossible. Look at the brands like "Kelly Blue Book", that name does not show the brands niche off the bat, but, over time, they have established their work in the car niche.

Using your name, or a variation thereof, like I do has the same challenges as we just mentioned. The challenge is there is no association with that niche to your name. It will take time to brand yourself as the person who blogs about X or Y. It's a long road with self-branding, but it can allow you to blog in many niches, not just one.

Write Good Headlines

Writing great headlines is a skill every serious blogger needs to master. The headline, or title, is what shows on search engines and pops up when liking on Facebook and Twitter. It's the headline that will either draw in potential readers, or push them away.

The best headlines include an even mix of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. There are tools online that will help you measure your headlines for you to make them the best you can. We'll get into that further down the page. For now, we'll focus on the parts of a good headline.

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Common

Common words include the, you, too, and the list goes on. These often are needed to link ideas together and help make your headline readable. For this post, I choose to add the common word 'you' as it was important for the idea to make sense. Every headline needs common words, but be sure not to overdo it. You want to ensure you have room for other, more important words.

Uncommon

Uncommon words include need, more, see and so on. These are very similar to common where they are often used to connect ideas and short phrases. They may even add a little weight to your headline such as the word need. Using 'need' will not only connect ideas, but it implies urgency and a sense of lack if the reader owns the item.

Emotion

These next two word sections are the bread and butter of your headlines. Emotion words stir up just that, emotion in your reader. Many people act on emotional impulses and chances are you've clicked this link because an emotion formed after reading the blog title. Emotion words include: immediately, proven, and secrets. All of which I used in the headline for this blog post.

Power

Power words drive home an idea and work to get your skimmers to become clickers. These include words like gigantic, unusual, and discount. You want these words to be unique and trigger the reader to click on your blog post. Power words will drive traffic to your blog post from both social media and search engines.

Proven Headline Secrets Word Mixture

You want to mix these four types of words well within your title. The formula is as follows, 30% of your post title should be common words. Do not go over this or your headline will fall flat and lack proper emotion. Uncommon words should be 20% of your title.

Followed by about 10% of your words being emotion. Don't use too many emotion words. If you do there is a risk of sounding too much like a sales-person or your headline could appear as "click-bait." Finally, have at least one power word in your headline.

You will find as you build out headlines there is overlap between power words and emotion words. As I walk you through the steps of writing great headlines in the next section, you may find this common.

A great tool to measure your headline's potential effectiveness is CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer. It takes every part of the headline, displays what percent of each word you have, the type, and gives you an overall score. Anything above 75% is suitable for most blog posts.

Thanks For Reading!


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These are all great blog marketing/traffic ideas. Most people don't realize getting traffic to a website or blog can be very tricky and difficult. Consistency is also very key...

That's the thing, I bet for a lot of people, when they started on Steemit was 1st time creating some content & the fact that they have to learn also marketing now is probably overwhelming 😱

Yes! Consistency is a huge factor that I touched on it the past. I need to make a dedicated post about that soon.

Yeah, I totally agree that I prefer just writing posts instead of marketing.

Thanks for opening some eyes towards the fact that I should spend more time on marketing.

🤔Hmmm, I guess this comment counts as it 😅

Loved some ideas, especially piece about headlines👊

I like the part about being well-rounded because it seems a lot of us think we can just know a lot about one thing and have a reasonable chance to have people read our blog which to me seems like it’s usually not the case!

Exatly! We need to have a good gasp on many things as bloggers and always strive to learn more.

I've been having major issues on Twitter re: steemit. I use the place to market great posts I see here and try to get my content creating connections to come in. But - most of those on my 200+ steeming twitlist will not retweet to save their lives.

I get good RT's on my steemit tweets, but not from steemers - my other connections are the ones who do the RTing.

The only time any action happens is when someone complains about steemit in a post or a stand alone tweet. THEN steemers come out of the woodwork to RT and to complain further. So frustrating!

You need to diversify. Show that you can offer more. That you arent a "one trick pony".
I just realized that. Im now a friendly violinist/singer that writes about cryptocurrencies and stuff. Who figured. A month ago if someone told me a combination like that could exist id laugh hard. Haha. 😂

Upvoted - some great tips there. I must say that the use of power words has got a bit silly and it's taken the power out of them. Every day I see posts that have 'Secret', 'Insane', 'Crazy', 'Shocking' and other power words to get your attention, but the overuse of them is actually a detraction. I tend to avoid these posts now as they are usually trying to oversell something that doesn't have the substance that it pertains to have. There are certain power words that are effective however such as discount as you mentioned. Others might be time based such as 'this week only' or scarcity such as 'only 100 left'.
Great post though, very useful.

Some solid ideas and strategies laid out here plain and simple.
I really don't understand why people get hung up on marketing.
When you've spent time and made your blog then the obvious thing is to get some exposure for it?
No point in being shy about it. Shout it from the rooftops.

Do you know what I just learnt from your post?

To skyrocket my blog....i must try the following
1- Have a very good heading
2- Stir up emotions in my reader's mind
3- Spend more time in marketing my content

I'll work on these three.....

Thanks alot, I really appreciate!!

Don't forget to write the best content you can!

I'm doing my best and also working on my content everyday.

writing poems is just one of my hobbies I can't do without...I'm working on expanding my audience

Great post. Marketing here on steemit is a big challenge. With such a big user base, it gets difficult to reach the correct pair of eyes. Too many minnows for very less whales now. Many will just leave without being noticed.

Many will just leave without being noticed.

This will happen anywhere to be honest. It is easier to build a following here than most other places in my opinion.

One thing I like about Steemit is everything is open here. You can literally stalk anyone here. It uncovers a lot of success mantras. You can visit profiles of successful people to check their success journey.

Thank you for this post. Goes without saying that it is everyone's dream to make something big on Steemit.

I find that I definitely get best results staying within groups with similar interests. Funnily enough photographers and artists interest me as a writer and often I interest them.

I guess inspiration works both ways.

Solid content, I think a lot of people may draw benefits from this work of yours @jrswab 🙏🏼

Especially liked that you had quite a unique approach to this article, a lot of "minnowhelp" just echoes the same old tips but you took your own spin combined with good writing that makes the message come across way clearer 🤟🏼

Don't know your overall interests but if you happen to be into travelling, vlogs, fitness, self-development etc feel free to check out my channel, in any case keep spreading solid content and I'll see you around!

Thanks for the kind words mate! I'll give your blog a look over :D