This is a guest post by Amanda Green.
Marketing your blog effectively is not rocket science if you know what you’re doing. While there are many different things that you need to do to get your blog’s marketing right, the first key thing to focus on is building a strong foundation. In the article below we discuss a few tips to help you build this very foundation to market and grow your blog.
1. Brand Your Blog
In order to stand out of from the other bloggers and to look “different”, you should customize the overall appearance of your blog with a logo along with a unique blog design. Just the way you’d use a branded conference app to reach out to your target audience at a convention or trade show and be unique in yourself, branding your blog will help you connect with your visitors in spite of the competition.
Make sure you use unique images/colors on your blog. Also, the theme and the colors should be consistent throughout the blog. The aim here is to create a unique brand that your readers will feel familiar or at home with over time. The more you focus on the branding of your blog, the better it is.
2. Don’t Make Your Visitors Think
Keep your blog clean and simple. Make the navigation easy to understand and have a sitemap included to guide new/old readers around the blog. For example, there are different types of plugins available (both paid and free) that let you customize and organize your blog posts along with links to any related content. The overall look and feel of your blog should be straightforward. Don’t have too many bells and whistles that confuse your visitors.The less they think when moving through your the blog, the higher are the chances that they will return for more.
3. Post on a Regular Basis
If you look around you’ll find that most of the reputed blogs post regularly. This gives them enough content to connect with the existing and as well as new readers. Marketing a blog becomes difficult when the posting frequency is inconsistent. People that read blogs are always looking for fresh ideas and unique tips. By giving real and consistent value to your readers, they will perceive your blog higher than the other blogs that don’t give such value. Although this isn’t the only step when branding your blog, it is indeed an important one.
4. Create Top Notch Content
How will you market a product that isn’t of good quality? Your blog is a product in itself and in order to market this product, you have to infuse value into it by writing and publishing great content. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there but only a few succeed because they work on providing unique content that gets shared all over the web. Yes it takes real effort to create good blog content, but the effort that you put into doing it will pay off when your readers read and spread the word about it.
Even if one of your blog posts goes viral, it can result in thousands of free visitors and hundreds of targeted subscribers. So the more time (or money) that you invest into creating better blog content, the easier it will be for you to market the blog.
