The popularity of Blogging as a mainstream profession has boomed over the last decade. In fact, the number of bloggers is expected to reach 31.7 million in 2020. It is fair enough to say that each of us might even closely know a blogger in our close circles. Almost half of the bloggers probably started their blog as a hobby, while the other half was largely about making some income.
Blogging has also become a preference for business brands that now accept the value of blogging in terms of their marketing. It is safe to say that Blogging is quite a rage these days. But, all blogs don’t make it to the mark and become popular, right?
If we explore the reasons behind the failure of budding blogs, we can arrive at some factors that are behind this failure. The incapability or failure to properly market the blog is probably the top reason for blogs dying out sooner than expected. Marketing the content of one’s blog is crucial and it requires time and devotion to keep the engine running. Most bloggers don’t do that.
Yet another reason; most bloggers give up when they don’t see the expected traffic or subscribers coming to their website. The lack of readers worries them so much that they decide to stop putting in any more efforts and let their blog die. Also, not having the necessary knowledge about bringing up a blog can be the death of a blog.
Since a lot of people start blogging as a part of their hobby, they tend to have an alternative such as a supporting job. This obviously, can take away the effort margin required to create, publish, and market the content that they push out through their blogging channels.
So, how should new or inexperienced bloggers plan the marketing of their blogs so that they can gain the traffic and subscribers they aim for, and also retain the existing audience?
Here are our tips to help you plan the marketing of your blog.
Make your website speedy
Way before you begin to market your blog and its content, you need to fix the loading speed of your blog. Did you know that if your blogging website took more than 2-3 seconds to load, your visitors will be quick to abandon it, at an alarming percentage? So, why take the chance of killing your own blog.
Your blogging site’s loading speed is a huge determinant of the User-experience on it. If you don’t put in efforts into the direction, you will end up driving away your own visitors. So, before you start investing in all the marketing tools and resources, make sure that you invest in a reliable and decent web hosting service. Implementing ‘Caching’ on your blogging website is also a welcome move into this direction.
Lastly, optimizing the images on your blog is also an important step to take care of the existing load on the server bandwidth; hence, speeding up your website. This brings us to the talk about using images on your blog to make it more appealing to the visitors. As per a report, blog articles with images get 94% more views. So, invest in good quality images to complement the content on your blog so that you can drive in more views.
Ease the navigation on your Blog
Imagine a scenario where you were able to market your blog well and the traffic came gushing in, but what happens when the audience can’t find a way around to look for the information they want to access?
We are talking about simplifying the navigation on your blog so that visitors tend to easily find their requested information and that they spend more time on the blog, looking for other related content.
Hence, if your blog is for the purpose of selling professional services or any other services/products, for that matter, you must know that as per a report, 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. Hence, it is an obligation for bloggers to make the navigation on their blog seamless and easy.
Create good-quality Content
Nothing can drive substantial traffic to your blog and retain the readership more than good-quality content can. It imparts value to the blog audience. Your blog exists for the purpose of delivering content to the audience; content that is valuable information to them. Essentially, it should be original, high on readability, and free of inaccuracies or grammatical errors.
Here’s a quick tip: way before you decide to start a blog, you must identify the correct niche that you would like to explore for your audience. You should have a fair hold on the subject matter of this niche and should be passionate about further research so that you can keep adding value to your content as and when you explore new topics under the same niche.
Coming back to the need of creating good quality content for the purpose of marketing it, one must also know that Plagiarism or skimming content should be highly avoided. As a matter of fact, Search Engines can penalize your blog for using the plagiarized content.
Hence, as a blogger, your content should be of high-quality, free from Plagiarism and errors and most importantly, it should create value for the audience. Once you accomplish these, your blog marketing will become as easy as a pie.
Consistent blogging is the Key
To be able to market their blog, bloggers need to be consistent in their posting so that their existing audience has something to consume periodically. A HubSpot report has mentioned that company blogs that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published zero to four monthly posts. This further emphasizes the importance of consistent blogging.
Since WordPress happens to be the ultimate blogging platform among the many other choices of website platforms, a lot of people use it for blogging. If you are a WordPress blogger, you can use the Editorial Calendar plugin to make sure that you can schedule your blog posts for regular blogging.
Engage with other bloggers
To be able to reach out to a new set of audience for your blogs, you must ethically engage with other bloggers, their content, as well as their audience. What you can do is go through their blog posts and regularly comment on them and provide them with subtle feedback as well. You must also invite them to engage with your blog and provide you feedback on the same. A little friendly competition will help all the involved bloggers grow their blog. Collaborating for guest posts or Live guest sessions is also a good idea to drive in new blog subscribers.
Share your content on Social Media
The best way to market your blog is to talk about it on social media. You must share your blog updates on your personal as well as blog’s social media channels so that people can stay updated about whatever is coming next on the blog. Enabling social media sharing of your blog posts will help your site audience further share the content of your blog among their circles.
Keep updating the design of your blog
One of the prime steps you need to take to keep marketing your blog efficiently is by constantly updating it with the latest design trends so that it stays visually appealing for the audience. A refreshed blog design will help you retain the existing subscribers by driving away the monotony.
Bonus Tips:
- The average word count of top-ranking content (in Google) is between 1,140-1,285 words. So, aim for the count to make your blog posts more reachable.
- Optimize your content for the Search Engines.
- Bring in subscribers through Email marketing.
- Build overall organic engagement for a long-term blog performance.
- Keep reviving your old blog posts that were quite popular when published back in the day so that you can keep the traffic looped.
- Adding Podcasts to your blog marketing strategy can help you bring more engagement.
- Maintaining the accuracy of your blog information is crucial
Conclusion:
Effective blogging has become a marketing strategy pre-requisite for mainstream blogs as well as big brands that look forward to engaging their audience with quality content.
Going back to 2013, there were 152 million blogs on the internet. It’s almost 2019, and the competition is way more grueling, thanks to the exploding count of the blogs over the Internet. Hence, it is essential to have an edge over others when it comes to creating value blog content as well as marketing it. We hope that our article will help you drive significant insights into what you can do to market your new blog effectively and help it grow each day rapidly.
–
Pawan Sahu is the founder of MarkupTrend. He is a Digital Marketer and a blogger geek passionate about writing articles related to WordPress, SEO, Marketing, Web Design, and CMS, etc.
