Building a blog creates an incredible opportunity for professional, creative, and emotional growth. No matter the motive of your online musings, setting up your own space to provide insights, inspire, or offer alternate perspectives, sets you up to become more well-versed in what it is that you currently do. You also become more capable of taking on tall order tasks when it comes to digital marketing, web design, and development later on in life. If you’re just getting started on the process of creating your blog, you’ll want to check out some basic tips to help you build it out and start adding content first. If you’ve already got the blog up and are now trying to figure out what basic steps you can take to increase traffic and provide your users with a high quality experience, keep reading!
If you’ve joined the blogging world, you’ve probably figured out that the phrase “build it and they will come,” doesn’t hold true when it comes to attracting an audience for your site. Although building an engaged audience for your blog might be harder than what you assumed at first, advances in the digital marketing field are making it quicker and simpler for newbies to take on the tall order of building and maintaining a solid digital marketing strategy for their blogs.
Here are four of the simplest and most effective digital marketing tips for bloggers.
1. Work with other bloggers
When bloggers work with one another to gain additional reach, their potential for success amplifies significantly. The best way to start working with other bloggers is to simply introduce yourself. You can do this by either sending them an email, or engaging with them on social media. Breaking the ice is as simple as telling them who you are, and what your blog is about.
Once you’ve established a few relationships with other bloggers, keep them going! Share relevant content of theirs and leave genuine comments under the pieces that you enjoy.
If you see an opportunity where you and another blogger could leverage each other’s influence in the future and amplify the success of one of your projects, having an established relationship early on will make it easier to ask if they would like to work with you.
2. Pay to play on social media
One of the most important things a blogger can understand about social media marketing is that it is no longer an unpaid strategy. Although there are certainly many ways a blogger can utilize social media marketing to gain organic traffic on social media, a solid paid strategy will still be necessary for optimal success. This is because many social media platforms have implemented algorithms that keep your audience from seeing all of the content you post.
Fortunately, advertising on Facebook has become simpler, more affordable, and more effective over the years. If you’re new to Facebook advertising, Ad Espresso offers up a pretty thorough guide for beginners.
3. Implement internal linking
Search Engine Optimization on your site is absolutely essential. Although you’re already doing what is arguably the most important part- creating consistent and quality content- it will be important to pay attention to other details like internal linking as well.
Internal linking essentially means linking to other pages on your site within your blog content. The benefits of this are twofold. First, it helps build your site’s overall SEO value by showing that all of your content is related to a specific theme. Second, it helps keep readers on your site for longer by providing additional resources to help them learn more from your expertise.
If you’re new to the concept of internal linking, the Moz blog offers up an awesome guide for SEO newbies.
4. Write for other sites
Contributing to other sites is a fantastic way to build your personal brand as well as earn additional exposure for your blog. As a contributor to other blogs, you can create articles that fit within the publication’s writing guidelines to share your insights with their audience. The benefit here is that you can add a blurb about your blog, and a link to it in your bio so that their readers can visit your blog if they liked your contributed work.
If you’re new to contributing content to other publications, you’ll want to check out a quality guide to make sure you do it right. One of my favorite guides on becoming a guest contributor can be found on Kissmetric’s blog.
So there you have it, four simple yet effective ways to promote your personal brand and your blog with digital marketing. You may find that building and maintaining a blog is a bit difficult at first when you try to balance it with other important parts of your life, but it gets easier once you’ve created a process for producing quality content and driving real users to view it. Fellow Lifehacker, Nick Thacker, has provided an awesome guide for those of you struggling to build the blog of your dreams, while working full time.
Hopefully these simple hacks for boosting your blog’s audience will help inspire you to work and make your blog as successful as you possibly can. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments!
Featured photo credit: iStock via istockphoto.com
