Hot Topic: How To Market Your Blog (Part Two)
Due to increased visitor interest surrounding blog marketing and promotion, I’ve decided to present another installment.
The first installment of How To Market Your Blog focused on techniques such as finding your niche, networking, and ad-cessorizing your site with tools such as Google Adsense. This series continues with more tips and tricks to incorporate into your blog promotion strategy.
Know Your Readers
Interacting with your blog’s readers is something that we should all do. By reading their comments and feedback (and responding if necessary) this gets you familiar with each other, and making friends this way also builds up your network. You can also fine-tune your new posts and content according to what generates the most buzz. It’s easy to use this to your advantage if you know the bulk of your readers really enjoyed a certain topic. For instance, if they went crazy over that Missoni scarf you thrifted for $20, post about every great frugal buy you make. Keeping this in mind, you can deliver your readers quality, even customized content that should keep them coming back for more.
Make a Good Impression
Your site’s layout, organization, and ease of navigation are the ‘storefront’ to your blog. How many times have you gone to a site and promptly clicked away from it because their layout bored you at first glance? First impressions are everything, so be sure that your layout is generally aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. Have a friend test it out for good measure.
Additionally, spelling and grammar check are your friends. You’d be amazing at how many writers, for instance, still aren’t sure of the difference between your and you’re.
Your is possessive – “Your handbag is fabulous,” and you’re comes from you are – “You’re fabulous.”
Get it? Also, try not to use run-on sentences, and make sure that there is a space after every comma or period that separates a sentence.
Update Regularly
This is a given, but when you update regularly, people will return regularly. Also, depending on the buzz around your blog, interested readers will not want to miss your latest ramblings and will check back frequently antisipating your updates. I know I love signing on to my feeds and seeing new blog posts from my favorite sites!
Read Your Feeds
Previously I introduced the technology of RSS feeds for those who weren’t aware of what they are. But once you’ve chosen your favorite feed reader and have subscribed to all your favorite blogs, use this technique to stay up to date on what’s going on in the blogosphere. My mornings are intermittently comprised of catching up on feeds over my A.M. lattes. I’ve subscribed to a few personal sites, various beauty blogs, fitness blogs, and my favorite technology sites. This technique may also inspire you to write about a topic on days when your ideas seem to be dried up.
Analyze Your Stats
My favorite hit tracking tool is Site Meter and I will be adding Google Analytics soon. Anyone who uses a site tracker is used to checking out how many hits they’ve gotten that day and where people are coming from, but this can be taken a step further. Give yourself traffic goals to strive for (and don’t just sit there, network!). Note what your visitors are clicking on the most and expand your content in this way. Rearrange your layout if necessary to make popular content easily accessible – or to get your visitors to notice less popular content. The goal is to keep people reading, especially if you are using ads to monetize your site. More pageviews = more revenue.
Utilize Tags and Keywords
Your stats should also reveal what search queries people are using to get to your site. A huge concept in the arena of blog marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). Tags and keywords are some main tips that can be used to move up search engine ranks – tagging all your entries and using descriptive blog and page titles earns you higher ranking. Just imagine what people would be typing in the search box to find that post or page you are writing and title/tag them accordingly.
If you are a WordPress user, the lastest version of WordPress includes a tagging feature.
Always Add New Content
Whether it be helpful articles, tutorials, or graphics (written or made by you, of course), content sparks reader interest and therefore pageviews. This also gives you more opportunities to tag and title (Google and others will notice) and gives people a reason to return to your site outside of the blog. Blog entries are generally read a couple times based on the topic, but good content pages are read over and over again.
Set Goals
What better motivator than to set goals for your site’s future! Set traffic goals, update frequency goals, marketing goals…everything. Jot down all ideas that come to mind and follow up on the ones that stand out. Having your own website should be fun and rewarding, whether your goal is to help others for personal joy or to make a small living off doing something you love.
