10 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

Marketing Your Blog: 10 Essential Tips You Should Know

By Edward Khoo. 

1. Target Your Content To A Specific Readership

Image: via Dat Le

Unless you want to throw all of your marketing budget and precious time on people who could care less about your blog, then you must pay attention to determine the preferred audiences to whom you would like to target. Before posting any piece, determine if it hits the sweet spot of your demographic.

2. Be Original, Be Honest

Don’t follow the herd within your sphere of interest. Followers aren’t innovators and innovation keeps readers reading. So, don’t simply spin the same old post. Take an original slant on a common topic.

Be honest. Verify your facts and provide links to additional verification. Readers trust you to be a good reporter, instructor, mentor or inspiration so keep it honest at all times.

3. Don’t Be Afraid Of A Little Controversy.

Controversy sells. You and I know that. If it is a part of your business model, be prepared to engage others with differing opinions because, guaranteed, lots of readers will disagree, and you may even encounter a few trolls and haters who frequent blogs for no other purpose than to post inflammatory garbage.

4. Post As A Guest Blogger

Don’t post to just any blog within your realm. Submit your best pieces to the prestigious blogs – the ones that already have a substantial following. For example, Hongkiat.com is considered by industry insiders to be one of the best blogs for designers, marketers and freelancers. Getting one of your posts published on a top of the line blog is a great way to drive traffic to your blog where readers can find tons of content – all your archives – just waiting for a bookmark.

Of course, getting published on a well-established blog requires insight and something new to be added to the discussion. A rehash of conventional wisdom, regardless of the field of endeavor, won’t make the cut with top tier blogs within any industry or area of interest.

5. Simplify Subscriptions

Don’t hide your RSS button down the page together with your WordPress theme credit links, make them visible & clear for your reader’s eyeballs by taking the following approaches:

• Add an RSS chicklet at the top of your sidebar so visitors can easily load your posts into their RSS readers.
• Offer email subscriptions.
• Provide links to mobi feeds so readers can access new content from their cells or iPhones.
• Provide one click subscriptions using reader links to PageFlakes, Google Reader and other remote site readers. You can build a big following fast if you make it easy to find your blog again. And again, and again.

P.S. - Five Tips to Increase Email Click-Through Rates

In this article, you'll learn...

• Why email marketers should use post scripts in their messages
• Five ways to create powerful email post scripts

You receive an email from your friend and scan it quickly to get the gist of the message. She signs the email with her usual "Talk later, Joan," and adds a post script (P.S.).

Suddenly, she's got your attention. You know that she's going to share a juicy tidbit that might even be the primary reason for her email.

Direct marketers have used the P.S. for years, likely beginning with the father of direct marketing, Lester Wunderman, way back in the 1960s. More recently, online marketers have relied heavily on the P.S. to make one final push for a click.

Simply put, the post script is a powerful tool, whether used in a direct mail piece or a simple email. Here are five things you can do with your post script to generate more clicks in your emails.

1. Restate your key benefits

Hopefully, you've made your point in the body of your email and provided the key reasons recipients should take action. Usually, those reasons are the key benefits of responding to the call to action. For example:

• You'll discover an oft-maligned word that increases conversion 113%.
• We finally reveal the one thing we did to practically double our opt-in rate.
• We explain why using a "siege mentality" will get you more business.

In case recipients have read your message through to the P.S. and still haven't taken action, simply repeat the key benefits one more time and include your link.

(P.S. This approach also works really well for any call to action, including an opt-in form or add to cart button.)

Lead Generation

Generating website traffic is only half the battle.


Businesses need to take what they understand of their ideal customer and develop  premium offers. These move potential customers deeper in the sales funnel.

This is done by offering premium offers, landing pages and call to action buttons on your website:

• Where blogs are public-facing and available for all to digest, premium offers like webinars and e-book downloads are linked to from call-to-action buttons and require visitors to submit their email address on a landing page in order to retrieve or register.

• When a visitor fills out the form to access this content, a lead is created. Businesses can then use what they know about that content, and their target prospect, to build out both an electronic and human follow-up process.
• This is online lead generation at its simplest and most effective. For businesses seriously considering their website as a enabler of growth, the marketing efficiency behind these tactics is undeniable.
• And from a sales perspective, leads generated from premium educational, customer-targeted content are hugely productive due to how clearly they convey a prospects needs.

Source: Hubspot

30 Social Media Marketing Tips

1. Write blog content for your target audience, which is not necessarily yourself. This happens with startups a lot. They blog about being entrepreneurs, which is great – if your target audience is entrepreneurs. Blog about the things that your community wants to know about. (Source: Mark Suster)

2. If you’re going to use social media for customer service, mirror your hours of operation on Twitter to the hours of operation you have for your support team. (Source: Jeff Esposito)

3. Measure social media ROI by analyzing how it performs compared to more established channels or advertising methods. It’s not comparing apples-to-apples when it comes to cost, but you can compare the quality of traffic they drive to your website. (Source: The Next Web)

4. Mobile check-in deals aren’t just for restaurants and bars. See how one medical practice creatively offered a special to his tech-savvy patients for checking in. It’s something any small business marketer can learn from. (Source: Mashable)

5. How frequently you blog does count. Businesses that blog daily generate 5 times more traffic than those that post only weekly or daily. (Source: Social Media Examiner) Bonus tip: need ideas for all that content?