4 Little-known tips on profitable marketing through blogs

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marketing through blogs

Marketing through blogs:  Tips and Tricks.

You heard people (including me) telling you about the benefit of creating a business blog.

You summoned up courage and you created one for your business.

You even created high-quality content that is search engine friendly and engaging for your audience.

But, the problem is, it is not generating the results you want.

You know what?

It is not peculiar to you alone.

Almost all businesses that have been blogging for long has passed through the same problem.

The truth is:

The age of “build it and they will come” has gone. Everyone and their grandmother is selling on the internet now.  This has greatly increased competition for every business.

One of the best ways to cut through the noise and get to your target audience is by aggressive marketing through blogs.

In this article, you will learn about some advice that can help you to overcome your present business blogging problem.

1.   Create a business blog marketing plan

A business blog marketing plan is a document that shows you what you want to achieve and how you can achieve it through your business blog.

When you have a good plan in place, it will be easy to measure your success.

The first thing you need to do when writing your blog marketing plan is to set your business goals in place.

What are your goals for the business blog?  It can be to :

business blog marketing plan

 

Whatever it is you want to achieve through business blogging should be clearly indicated on your marketing plan.

Secondly, search for your competitors. You will need to know what is working for them, so you can follow suit. Check their most popular content and create something better.  Check out their social media networks and look for their top performing posts and create something better.

This will make it easier and faster for you to achieve success.

Also, in creating your blog marketing plan, you will need to know your audience.

Who are your audience? What are their interest, demographic, location, etc?. Where do they hang out online? What problems are they facing that your product/service can solve, etc.

Answering these questions will enable you to create perfect content that will meet their needs.

Create content that is specifically designed for their buyer’s journey, so it can convert as you want.

Lastly, you need to decide on the channels of distribution you want to use to spread your content to where your audience will consume it.  This can be the social media networks, email, search engines etc.

You can read my post on business blogging marketing plan for an in-depth analysis of the topic.

2.   Answer your audience’s questions

The fundamental truth about business blogging success is that it must be built around your audience. You need to answer your audience questions.  Marcus Sheridan, the pool guy started that way. His company was hit hard by the recession in 2008. They looked for ways to stay afloat and he and his partners decided to try out blogging.

They started writing content by answering their customer’s questions through their blog posts.  Check out a sample of their blog post below:

 

He did it to the extent that he made $2 million from a single post on “How much does a fiberglass pool cost?

Today, the website is one of the leading pool websites on the internet.

So, how do you know the questions your audience is asking?

I discovered a great free tool recently called – answerthepublic 

marketing through blogs

 

When you type in your niche or topic, it generates a series of questions that your audience may be asking through the search engines.  Lots of questions!

For example, let’s try the dog care niche.

Type in “dog care” and click on “Get Questions“.

It will bring out a page with an infographic containing questions on the niche as shown below.

marketing through blogs

marketing through blogs

The result of the search is 40 questions on dog care.  It has the what, which, are, how, why and when questions on dog care.

Examples include:

*             how much is dog care a day

*             dog care when in heat

*             are dog hard to take care of

*             What does dog day care cost etc.

If you can create high-quality content on these questions/keywords, you will get lots of traffic to your website which will eventually convert to leads and sales.

Secondly, you can use Quora, a question and answer website to get questions your audience is asking.

Type in your niche/keyword in the search bar. Here, we will still use the dog care niche.  See the result below:

marketing through blogs

As seen above, below are sample questions you can work with.

*             How can I show my dog I love as much as he loves me

*             What might cause itchy bumps on dogs?

*             How can I treat constipation in a newborn puppy? What care should I take. etc.

You can drill down to see much more questions on your niche.

Just like Marcus Sheridan did, you will create high-quality articles on those questions.

 

3.   Promote your content on social media networks

Writing content is good, promoting it is great.  One of the best platforms for content promotion is the social media.

Neil Patel defined the social media as:

marketing through blogs

Check out the statistics below:

*             50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social network

*             The average consumer mentions brands 90 times/week with family, friends, and co-workers.

Do you know that social media traffic is one of the biggest referrers of traffic at your disposal?  It made up 31% of overall traffic as at 2015.

You can literally build a business on the social media because the traffic it provides is of a good quality. They are engaged.

marketing through blogs

Below are tips for your social media success:

a.   Choose the social media platform that is good for your business.

According to Wikipedia, there are over 200 social media platforms. The conversation prism below provides a good overview of all the social media networks.

marketing through blogs

 

The reason why most businesses fail in social media marketing is because they try to be everywhere.  They are on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Medium, Pinterest, Instagram etc.

Marketing through the social media involves investing time and resources to build a following for your business.  It is difficult to perform well on all of them. This is the reason why you will need to select two or three social media platforms to focus your marketing efforts on.

When you do that, you will generate faster result as you investing your time and efforts in the right platform.

The question is, how do you know the right social media platforms for your business?

The best short-cut (this is legal, trust me!) iIhave found is to use the Buzzsumo tool. Type in your niche into the search bar and click search.  It will bring up top competitors in the niche and their top contents on the social media. Check them out below:

marketing through blogs

 

From the result shown above, you can see that Facebook is the best social media platform for the “dog care” niche. Facebook has the highest share of content among the five major social networks, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter. So, you can focus more on Facebook and any other one you want.

b.   Feed the social channel with high quality content

Now that you know your preferred channel, you need to create valuable content on your blog for your audience on the social media. The social media is a content monster that needs to be fed consistently.

The rule here is consistency.  Once you stop posting for a few weeks, your social media network will stop growing. This is why you need to generate lots of content to build a content bank to share with your target audience.  If you don’t have enough in-house staff to create content for your business, simply hire a good content writer to do it.

You can share things like, blog posts, infographics, pictures, quick tips, quotes, videos, jokes etc

c.   Frequency of post

A lot of people are confused about the frequency of post on the social media network. How often should you post?

If you share less, there will be less engagement on your page, on the other hand if you share more, you may also hit a point of diminishing returns.  So, what is the right frequency to post?

Check out this infographic from Buffer below.

marketing through blog

 

 

 

When you publish a new post on your blog, follow the chart below to share it.

marketing through blogs

 

4.   Measure your results

You need to track your results to see what is working and what is not.  This will enable you to improve on your blogging and social media strategies.

Here, you can use a free tool – Google analytics to measure the first five metrics below:

With this tool you can track:

  1. Pageviews
  2. Traffic sources
  3. Time on site and bounce rate
  4. Social media shares
  5. Social emdia clicks
  6. Blog comments
  7. Inbound links
  8. Email staTs
  9. Conversion rates
  10. Customers

The result you see determines how well you are doing. All the factors below add up when you get leads, customers, revenue and profit in your business.

A word of caution though, business blogging or blogging generally is a marathon and not a sprint.  You may not see the desired result in one week, one month or even one year.  The key to seeing great result is consistency in all you do on your blog.

 

Hephzibah Asaolu

I am Hephzy Asaolu (aka Ladywriter), a professional Freelance content writer and blogger.

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