The digital environment is constantly growing as technology advancements keep showing up almost every day. Nowadays, there are lots of online blogs competing for the same eyeballs, and your blog platform is just one of many. If you truly want to succeed in this field of activity, you should understand two things:
- Blogging success is dependent on many factors, and there’s a high degree of complexity when figuring out what works best for your blog.
- Blogging success requires your full attention, a lot of your time, energy, and a great deal of patience. It also requires discipline and commitment.
Now that you know what it takes, let me ask you…Are you up to it? Because if these requirements make you anxious, you should probably step back and build some skills. If you’re confident and ready, then let’s get on to it!
In today’s post, I’m covering 6 essential promotion tips that should help you gain a competitive advantage in your blogging niche. The greatest successes lie in the basic actions that are well done. Pay attention and apply!
1. Understand Your Audience Like You Understand Your Best Friend
As I’ve mentioned before, a blog (which is going to be monetized) is an actual business and it must be treated like one. For a business to be profitable, it must sell products or services. Before these products and services arrive in the hands of customers, business owners or business sales managers must define and fully understand their audiences.
Simply put, you cannot make money unless you know how to approach your future customers and that requires a good understanding of where they come from, how they act, what they want, and what makes them “tick”.
Here’s how you should approach this process: think of an ideal customer who is likely to be heavily interested in what your blog has to offer (we’ll call him the “target persona”.)
The first step to identify your target persona is to ask yourself a few important questions:
- What does my ideal customer value most?
- What problems and what needs does my target persona have?
- What urges does my ideal customer have?
- What information does my target persona need?
- What’s the age, gender, nationality, religion, culture of my target persona?
- What beliefs, convictions, and attitudes does my ideal customer have?
- What content style does he/she prefer? Aggressive? Motivating? Mild? Smooth? Funny?
- Where can I find my ideal customers? Where do they spend their time online?
You can add more questions that will serve the same purpose: identifying your ideal customers. If you have traffic or/and email subscribers, you should refine your target persona understanding by simply asking them what they want, what they enjoy, and what they’d like to see more of from your blog.
I insist on this tip because it’s probably the most important aspect that you should never neglect. Do this at the beginning of your blogging journey and your marketing and sales strategy will prove to be much more efficient than otherwise.
2. Provide Relevancy, Value, and Trust
Identifying your target audience is the first step. After you have collected information and gained sufficient understanding, you have to figure out how you can please and satisfy your blog readers and future customers on a consistent basis. There are three things you should focus on:
Relevancy, value, and trust.
If you haven’t skipped the target persona identification process, offering relevant content and products shouldn’t be an issue. When I talk about relevancy, I’m talking about providing information or products that will immediately attract your target audience’s attention.
Providing value is another essential key to blogging success. Blogging is basically dependent on content. The more valuable information (content) you post the faster your blog will grow in awareness, reputation, and customer trust. Providing value means to deliver content, products, and services that offer a unique value proposition. Simply put, if a topic has been discussed 1000 times and most of your niche competitors are already covering it, you shouldn’t do exactly the same.
Instead, you should find a twist, add a new spark, or present the same information in a totally different way. So, to conclude, offering value means to satisfy your prospects’ needs in such a way that they’ll come back for more.
The blog’s trust factor is truly dependent on your content and product’s relevance and value, your unique way of presenting your brand, on the user experience your business is offering, and also on the consistency of your brand. Do things right and people will begin trusting you. When they do, they will be happy to try your products or services because there will be no more barriers to purchase.
3. Leverage the Best Social Media Networks for Your Own Business
We have covered the basics – please, do not skip them. Structure your blog and your strategies in a qualitative manner and you’ll always do better than your competitors.
Many new bloggers commit a big mistake: they try to promote their blog in ten different places, dividing their effort, time, attention, and money inappropriately. You see, promoting your blog on every possible social network is just like multi-tasking (non-effective).
You must figure out where your customers love to spend their time, and you should focus on those places only. For example, you can’t promote “fun content” on LinkedIn, because that social network is designed to serve and connect professionals and experts. At the same time, promoting B2B services on Snapchat or Instagram might be less effective than doing it on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Therefore, you have to decide which social channel you’ll focus on. You can choose two, but I’d advise you take one. Become great at promoting your blog on that specific network and don’t move on until you’ve reached your goals and you get decent results with it.
4. Cultivate Strong Relationships
Networking is an essential part of your blogging experience, whether you like it or not. By that, I mean that you’ll always need the help of your customers and the help of other bloggers who do not represent a threat (they’re not competing for the same target audience).
Your fellow bloggers can help you with the following aspects:
- They can offer their advice whenever you get stuck/punished by Google/run into trouble with ideas.
- They can offer you backlinks by sharing, retweeting, or linking to your blog posts.
- They can offer you their encouragement and support whenever you’re having rough times.
How do you connect? Simply reach out through private messages (if that is possible) or through relevant and valuable comments on their blog posts or on social media channels that they frequently use. If you get their email, that’s even better.
Concerning your customers, you should also build a network of “close customers” who can help you with different tasks such as surveys, word-of-mouth-marketing, and other types of support when you need it.
5. Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines
Your content should be written for your target audience, and it should serve their needs and wants primarily. However, optimizing your content by identifying the most popular keywords/less popular keywords in the niche can serve you well in terms of search engine rankings.
SEO might frighten you since it is a complex domain of activity. However, the best blogs occupy the first positions in the SERPS. They must have realized that their promotion efforts could eventually be diversified, so seeking high rankings helped them build legacies.
Ideally, whenever you plan to write a post, you should have a specific keyword/key phrase that you’ll use for optimization. This means that you should use that keyword/key phrase more often than other keywords/key phrases. Don’t exaggerate, and don’t forget to use synonyms.
Search engine optimization isn’t a skill that can be taught in a subheading. I’d advise you check out several free SEO tutorials and pick up the information from there. Remember: getting better at SEO can only be done through practice and requires trial-and-error, time, patience, consistency, great content, great connections, and a lot of commitment.
6. Leverage Relevant Niche Influencers
My last tip is to advise you to promote your blog with the help of niche influencers. An influencer is a person/organization that is already well respected by a lot of people. A niche influencer is a person/organization that is already well respected by your target audience!
Therefore, the first step would be to identify influencers who do not represent a threat to your business, meaning that even if they promote you, your customers won’t jump into their boat.
The second step is to identify what you want to promote through them. Is it a blog post? A product? A service?
Then ask yourself if the influencer you’re going to reach will really prove to be useful. Are his followers/target audience a good match for what you want to promote?
The last step is to get in touch. Find out their contact information, contact them directly, and ask for a price. The higher influence the person/organization has the juicier the price will be. Don’t be afraid to invest your money in the right influencers – it will pay rich rewards!
Takeaways
Your blog is basically a business. In order to excel in the marketplace, your promotion strategies, your products, and your brand’s reputation must excel. Simply put, you must do better than your competitors, and that’s only up to you. Your knowledge and hard earned skills will aid you in the process, as will the connections which you have built over time.
Remember: the blogging environment is extremely competitive, so the more you commit, the better chances you’ll have. Use the above tips, add your own twists to them, and keep going until you succeed!
