MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

marketing your blog

4 Simple Tips for Effectively Marketing your Blog

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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.

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

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It’s been a while since I created a guide on blog marketing/driving traffic to a blog and obviously the need to update the material has occurred to me. Especially with the fact that I got lots of feedback based on the old one that I created and those feedback that I received were really good.

Now if you haven’t been reading my blog since last year, then the book that I’m referring to is the one entitled ‘Blog Marketing for Fame’. This free guide generally received positive feedback from most of my readers and I was happy with how it turned out. There were a couple of good suggestions that I put into work with regards to the new one.

So there I upgraded the guide and it has been rebranded as …

‘Blog Marketing Guide’

Aside from the old one having a long flimsy name, another reason for the renaming of the book is the fact that there’s really no guide on blog marketing in general available. And perhaps, ‘Blog Marketing Guide‘ as a name is pretty good and something easy to remember. It may not really be the perfect name for now but its something that’s good to start with.

The book just like most of my guides are free if you subscribe to my newsletter which is totally a no-brainer if you ask me. :p. The book has 5 general sections on how and where you can get traffic plus a detailed explanation/elaboration of the different things that I do that has worked extremely well for myself and hopefully can also work for you.

But the book isn’t really just the cool stuff here as the newsletter is the one that I would say I’m pretty proud of. Over the past few years I haven’t really had gotten a huge amount of people on my list. I have a couple of hundreds to be honest but I’m very proud to say that the community in my newsletter is a tightly-knit interactive group. Lastly, I usually put out lots of great advice and tips that I normally don’t publish here. And hey there were a couple of times that I even gave free goodies there. 🙂

Why Blog Marketing?

Pretty simple. Just like in my old post about most bloggers failing at marketing, the reason I created this thing is to be able to help out lots of bloggers on how they can market their blogs competitively.

Not much has really changed. Most bloggers aren’t still good at marketing their stuff and its pretty understandable. When I was getting started I looked at blogging as just writing and I believe this is how most bloggers trying to carve their niche look at blogging as well. Obviously its the wrong way to look at it.

We, bloggers have to be somehow in the middle of ‘writers’ and internet marketers (salesmen). We need to write out our usual selves while being good enough to promote it and get enough  people in our community. But we don’t need to sound like those marketers right? Nor do we need to push out one product after the other just to get affiliate sales. In short, we don’t want any part of being salesy yet we want to know how to market.

Hopefully that’s what the Blog Marketing Guide brings to the table.

So that’s my reason. Again, your feedback is highly appreciated and feel free to get this guide across the blogosphere.