10 Strategies to Market Your Blog Part 1

When you start out business blogging, you start doing things a certain way because it suited you when you started at that moment in time.

This post is aimed at business bloggers who have been blogging for 6 months and have some strong content under their belts.

These strategies are simple and effective for a number a reasons, but you might not have included them when you first started your blog.

1. Develop a marketing plan

It doesn’t have to be a long drawn out process that involves meditating and channelling the marketing gods, something quick and simple will do. You just jot down  some ideas of what your plans are when it comes to marketing your blog. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

2. Give free  trials to get more people to try your service – makes an alluring opt-in

Even if your service offer can be cancelled at any time, people are often weary of getting hooked into a subscription of something they’re unsure of. You’ve done it, I’ve done it and nothing annoys us more when we have paid another month for something we didn’t like / want /use.

You can offer a free trial to great effect and easily boost your opt-ins. The beauty of this is you don’t have to do it all of the time, you can do it at the start of a product launch or when you are quiet to build your list.

Free trials can even be used to develop future products for your blog by obtaining feedback from your readers.

People are funny creatures, if they are left with the responsibility of renewing their membership manually, in many cases, they don’t bother. I am of the mind that perhaps they were not all that interested after all…  Of course, you can test out both methods and see what produces the best results.

3. Marketing your blog with social media doesn’t have to be difficult

Getting your blog up and running with social media doesn’t need to be a difficult process. It’s not just a matter of installing the required buttons on your blog posts, but networking and engaging with people in your target market as well.

4. Social Networking

Although not a new concept by any means, the internet has brought social networking to a  new and different level. Starting primarily with the advent of instant messaging, the entire concept has grown in leaps and bounds.

Now there are sites dedicated to nothing but social networking; from MySpace which is used primarily by the younger crowd (you can see them under the cobwebs), to networks divided by interests, ethnicity and just about everything in between. Find the place where your ideal reader hangs out and hang out there too.

If they are on Facebook get a presence there, if they are in forums go and hustle there… go where your readers are and not where you would like them to be.

Some social networking sites don’t differentiate. Members simply join the site, and find their own interest groups or niches within which they feel compatible, sometimes creating their own niche resources. Think Facebook and LinkedIn groups… go and play nicely in the groups and you’ll be rewarded with fabulous blog traffic.

5. RSS Feed

RSS is a web-feed format that enables your subscribers to receive updates to your blog, website or other information directly to their chosen feed aggregator or reader. Your readers simply enter your feed’s URL into their reader (or they can click on an icon in any browser to begin the subscription process).

Most web hosting packages or blog sites will have everything you need to create this option for your readers. You should take a few minutes to read Bob’s post here. It’s the best headline you’ll ever read. Btw, wtf is RSS?

Next week we’ll look at 5 more ways to market your blog that you may have forgotten about.

To be continued…