While it may seem like a straightforward process, creating a blog is actually an incredibly complex experience. An estimated 500 million blogs are created each year, and the vast majority of them cover a broad range of topics that cover everything from food to fashion to photography.
In this article, you learn 5 smart strategies for marketing your blog. You'll also learn why marketing your blog is important and why you need to track your analytics.
Let's dive in!
Why is Marketing Your Blog Important?
Since the blogosphere first emerged, blogs have continued to be a popular form of self-expression for many people. There are even resources to build your community online that can help your blog grow. However, with millions upon millions of blogs on the internet, it can feel like you're fighting an uphill battle to get traffic and pageviews.
In this world where Google ranking determines if your blog receives traffic or where your blog sits in search results, it is more important to find a successful way of marketing your website than ever before.
But before you start implementing traffic-building methods, it's important to have a starting point so you know what's working. That means analyzing your blog's analytics and measuring:
- How many pageviews your site gets
- Where your traffic is coming from
- What content is performing the best
Understanding these and other metrics will give you a better idea of where to direct your efforts to increase traffic to your blog. Let's take a closer look at how to track your blog's performance.
What Is the Best Way to Track Your Blog Growth?
There are plenty of ways to track your website analytics, with Google Analytics being the most popular. Google Analytics can provide a lot of valuable data, but it can be a little confusing, especially if you're new to blogging and analytics. To get your blog analytics, you have to add code to your site, which can be complicated even for experienced bloggers.
Luckily, there are ways around this thanks to an abundance of WordPress plugins.
My personal favorite is ExactMetrics, which lets you connect your site to Google Analytics with a few clicks of your mouse. The whole process takes just a few minutes and you don't have to mess with any code. Once you've finished the setup process, you'll find easy-to-read reports right in your WordPress dashboard.
With ExactMetrics, you can easily track:
- Outbound links: Identify where traffic goes when leaving your blog
- Referrals: Know where your traffic is coming from
- Posts and Pages: See which articles and pages are getting the most visitors
- Landing and Exit Pages: See which pages attract and repel visitors
- Affiliate Links: Identify which types of products are bringing in the most money
Learn more about ExactMetrics here.
5 Easy Ways to Market Your Blog Online
Once you've got a benchmark for how your blog is performing, you can start testing different strategies. Below are 5 easy and ways to market your blog and get more traffic.
1. Build Your Brand & Drive Blog Traffic With Social Media
Social media is one of the best free traffic-building platforms for bloggers. So, it stands to reason using social media to market your blog is one of the most effective (and necessary) ways to attract an audience. It can also help you expand your reach further than just publishing a new blog post and calling it a day.
Promoting your blog on social media can also help you build your personal brand. Social media platforms bring an audience to your blog, which can boost engagement and improve your online presence.
You can grow your personal brand by:
- Promoting content
- Casting a wider net & bringing in a new followers
- Engaging with your followers
- Building authority with valuable content & insights
Social media makes that all possible. However, it's essential to tailor the way you share content to each specific platform when promoting your blog. For example, if you want to market a blog post on Instagram, consider pulling out important info from the article and creating a carousel post like this.
2. Use SEO-Friendly Keywords
Not familiar with SEO or keywords? It's not as complicated as it may sound! SEO-friendly keywords and keyword phrases tell users and search engines what your blog post is about.
For the most part, all blogs can be boiled down to a few key topics and ideas. Those are your keywords. Figuring out which keywords to use will require some research, which you can do using free tools like Moz's Keyword Explorer and Ubersuggest.
Using SEO keywords helps to improve the traffic to your blog in many ways. Two of the most important include:
- Increasing the relevancy of your content. When used strategically, searchers are more likely to find your content when they search popular keywords on Google or other search engines.
- Improving user experience. When you use relevant and high-quality content, it will be easier for users to find what they're looking for on your blog, which will result in a better user experience with your site and a higher conversion rate.
Learn more about using keywords and writing SEO-friendly blog posts here.
3. Build Trust & Credibility With Regular, High-Value Content
One of the most important things about marketing your blog is publishing high-quality content. Quality content is the key to creating a successful blog. Your content should not only align with your niche, but with your audience's interests.
The easiest way to understand what your audience wants is to ask them. If you're just getting started as a blogger, you may be thinking, “How the heck do I do that if I don't have an audience yet?!” It's actually easier than it sounds.
- Join Facebook groups related to your niche and pay attention to questions people ask or topics they post about.
- Visit online forums in your industry or niche.
- Browse through Quora to see what kind of questions people are asking.
- Poll your social media followers
- Search a topic on Answer the Public
- Research topics using tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, or Insider
Understanding your audience's interests, questions, and pain points is the best way to provide value that gets them to click through and share your content. When writing your blog post, make sure the reading experience is on point by using a tool like Grammarly to prevent errors.
4. Build Backlinks to Relevant, High-Quality Websites
Backlinks are crucial to building your blog's authority, which can help it rank higher in search engine results. While the ultimate goal is to get other bloggers and quality websites to link back to your site and content, there's actually an easy way to get your links on their sites.
How do you do that?
By leaving your mark on their comments section!
Most blogs will let you include a website link along with your name when your leave a comment on a blog post. Find other blogs in the same niche as yours, read their articles, and leave a thoughtful comment. This is an opportune time to boost your credibility and direct their audience back to your blog. The key is to leave a good comment that actually engages with the author and their content.
Don't just write, “This was a great article.” Share what you enjoyed about it and why, offer your take on the topic, or suggest a tip that they didn't include. This way, you give something back to the community, show that you're a valuable member, and most importantly, get new readers for your own content.
5. Share Your Latest Blog Post With Your Email List
An email list is incredibly important for any blogger because your email subscribers are already invested in the content you share.
Including links to your latest blog posts in emails is a smart way to market your blog because your email subscribers are already invested in your content. So, they're more likely to click-through and visit your blog. They're also more likely to share your blog posts on social media, whether it's Facebook, Pinterest, or another network.
Test Various Marketing Strategies for Your Blog
There you have it — 5 smart, yet simple ways to market your blog.
While these are great ways to grow your blog traffic, don't be afraid to experiment. Different marketing methods work better than others for certain blogs, so testing out different strategies can help you ensure you're investing your time and efforts wisely. Your analytics will give you the best insights into how your traffic-building strategies are working.
Want more tips on marketing your blog and ways to make money online? Check out this guide on the types of blog posts that make money and how to grow your email list. You can also find more articles on blogging in this content archive.
Did you find this article helpful? Save it to Pinterest!
Find The Quiet Type on social media:
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.