If you have just started blogging, it is so easy to get disappointed when you don’t get the instant results you're hoping for. But any such thing, it normally takes some time to have things rolling. It’s crucial to be patient at first since the quickest approach to fail is to quit too early!
With regards to profitable blogging, consistency is essential.
Luckily, you can find easy, yet effective techniques to significantly increase the number of subscribers, amount of traffic, and income from the beginning, and at the same time decreasing the energy and time spent maintaining your website. You’ll learn all of these blog marketing strategies.
There is absolutely no better way to remain focused and motivated than by getting results from your own efforts, and that is what you will experience once you follow the methods presented in this detailed guide.
Below is a brief summary of what’s included:
We'll go over the best strategies on how to promote your blog for free and generate extremely targeted traffic quickly.
We’ll also discuss the best ways to get those readers to join your email list and follow you on social media since finally, that's the very best way to gauge your success after getting started.
It’s additionally the best approach to keep that connection going, very long once they have left your website.
We’ll even have a close look at the kind of content that converts and will definitely position you as an expert in your industry. This kind of content is known as “sticky content” since it builds the pillars of your new blog and gives valuable information that your target audience is currently searching for.
Do you want to create a profitable blog that drives killer traffic, converts visitors into prospects and maximizes your revenue?
Let’s jump in!
Setting things up to succeed
The very first thing you need to do is ensure that your site is appropriately set up to be able to foster visitor engagement, encourage people to take action and consequently, establish an engaged subscriber base.
Primarily, we’ll focus on building your social media following and email list, so we’ll ensure that your blog is put together to help you achieve those two things.
The key points you'll want to pay close attention to:
Keep in mind that when a visitor studies the article that attracted him to your website, he'll probably never return unless you keep reminding him that you have informative and useful content. The best method to achieve this is to get in touch with him outside your blog, and the two best strategies are email and social media marketing.
So let me show you exactly how to set up your blog to gain more email subscribers and social followers.
Social media followers
Social media marketing is definitely an essential element of every web-based business. Most people have at least one social media profile where they log on and access it on a regular basis.
Click the image to view it in full size:
Consequently, it’s more crucial than ever before to create a presence on the top social networks, especially the ones that your target audience uses. I can practically guarantee you that if you aren’t on social media, the majority of your competitors are, and that provides them a serious advantage over you.
Not only will social networking allow you to interact with your target market, but it will allow you to create a trusted source in your niche easily and quickly. You might already have a plugin on your website that enables your prospects to share your content, but that just goes so far.
Your website really needs its own pages on different social media sites, plus you also want to make those pages clearly visible on your site. Make sure to put links to your main profiles on the sidebar, top menu bar, and anywhere else you believe your visitors might notice.
Email subscribers
Growing an email list is more important than ever before, since blog traffic is really at an all-time low.
Lots more people are hanging out on social media and video marketing platforms like YouTube, and less on blog sites.
Additionally, it’s harder to generate SEO traffic, as well. Therefore, building your opt-in list is essential to be able to develop a kind of traffic that won’t disappear because of the whims of netizens.
Building a list is comprised at first of three major points:
A lead magnet is a free gift you share so that you encourage visitors to join your email list. This might be a written report, a free mini-course, a physical item they have to only pay for shipping on, or any other valuable thing. However, it needs to be something your audience is really interested in.
The truth is, the majority of people don’t come back to a website on their own following the very first visit, and that’s usually because they’ve already studied the piece of article that directed them there. Maybe they searched for a problem on Google that they were suffering from, or saw a link to your articles on social media and thought it was useful. But as soon as they’ve browsed it, then what?
That’s the reason why it’s so critical to catch their email or encourage them to follow you on social media. When you make this happen, you can contact those people whenever required, such as for example when you published new content on your blog, ran a promotion or special offer.
One excellent method to grow your email list is by giving away quick reports that concentrate on a certain subject. Analyze your target market and think about what sort of issue they have that you could solve with that free study. Then use that free gift as your lead magnet.
Regarding email marketing tools, you might want to check the best autoresponders for affiliate marketing. By the way, I use GetResponse right now.
The key to high-converting content
No matter your niche, you’ll need to create content that solves a problem and helps your audience reach their goals.
Educate or inspire with evergreen content
When producing content for your website, you have to focus on two things:
Every blog post on your site has to accomplish one or both of these things. When you are creating how-to guides that deliver your visitors a detailed procedure for completing a task or achieving a goal, then you are educating.
When you put together an article that gives insight like case studies, personal success stories, or motivational posts, you’re inspiring your target market.
Information that either educates or inspires may be the easiest method to make blog posts that become sticky.
Consequently, you can encourage your readers to come back to your blog again later on or even sign up to your email list. It’s usually the best approach to produce share-worthy content and to position yourself an expert in your topic. One more thing to keep in mind when creating content for your blog is to concentrate on evergreen content.
This way, the information you publish today will still be relevant years from now since it won't become obsolete. It can reduce the time you spend revising or rewriting content preventing you from having to get rid of unnecessary content.
Begin by collecting links to your top 10 authority blogs in your market, and then invest some time studying the kind of content they provide, particularly articles with a lot of engagement, backlinks (both external and internal links) and a good amount of traffic.
Try to find things such as:
Write at least 5 pillar blog posts (cornerstone content)
Top-quality, unique and informative content is the crucial element to your blog’s success. In other words, it's the foundation for your whole business, but it's also the driving force behind converting that organic traffic into email subscribers.
Concentrate on building top-notch content pages on your website just before doing anything else. You want to create at least 4-5 pillar articles prior to starting to generate traffic to your blog. That would offer your readers sufficient reason to come back to your blog and also to keep a good impression in the mind of your audience.
Regarding the length of your articles, search engines favor longer content that provides original, useful information, so you should try to create articles that are at least 1500 words.
Think that might be hard to do? It’s actually not.
Pro tip: To make blog content creation easier, I use the best article rewriter and spinner. Check out these tools. Some of them are really good. I personally prefer ChimRewriter.
Alternatively, you might hire an essay writer like writemyessays.me. The choice is yours.
Focus on by making an outline for each blog post and then include pictures, headlines and bullet points that break up the article into digestible parts and keep visitors glued to the page. If possible, aim to publish how-to or step-by-step type articles. Not only will they be easier to create, but they’ll give actionable information that your visitors will enjoy.
Don’t be scared of other bloggers! Not only is this a powerful way to give extra value by directing your visitors to other resources that might help them, but it’ll make it simpler for you to get on the radar of authority bloggers in your industry.
The aim is to wow your audience so much that they come back to your site time and time again simply because they know you give value, and you are a trusted source of information.
One more tip: before publishing, don't forget to proofread your posts with grammar checker tools like Grammarly. Alternatively, Prowritingaid is a similar great tool. I'm using both.
How to promote your blog for free: choosing a primary traffic source
Now, it’s time to decide which traffic source you want to target as your primary source when promoting your blog. Remember it doesn’t mean you should disregard other strategies, only that you’re going to invest most of your efforts concentrating on your primary one.
The most important reason for targeting just one traffic source is because you don’t want to spread yourself too thin. If you invest a little bit of work into a ton of sources, you won’t get a large amount of traffic from any one of them.
However, if you put your focus on one source, you'll be able to significantly grow your traffic, and it's still possible to bring traffic from other places, too. The traffic sources you may choose include:
You want to basically focus your time and efforts on whichever traffic source is currently driving you the most visitors. If you’re currently not getting significant organic traffic, then it's a good idea to analyze these various sources to learn which one appears to have the highest density of your demographic.
Drive traffic through social media platforms
In case your audience is people who want to cook, consider Youtube or Pinterest. In case your audience is mainly young, fashion-forward women, Snapchat or Instagram could be great alternatives. Facebook is an effective all-around traffic generator with almost every demographic represented. LinkedIn is also a potential online platform to start a business or to find a job or many more things. If you are a LinkedIn user and willing to increase your online exposure then you may check out sources to purchase likes for LinkedIn posts.
Conduct a little research and identify where your target market tends to spend time, and discover the best options.
You can still switch gears later on, but try to commit to placing your best effort and hard work into the very first selected source for at least a few months, since it usually takes a bit of time to get things rolling.
In my opinion, the ultimate traffic source is SEO. But keep in mind that it takes for a long time until you get a good amount of traffic through Google. Besides, you have to promote your content and blog posts on many other places to achieve that.
Below is another method to gain targeted visitors to your website easily and quickly.
Comment on other blogs and build relationships
What you’re searching for are blogs that permit clickable signatures.
You’re possibly not planning to spam the blogs, however, you are going to make comments offering value and are tightly related to each article.
For instance, in case your website is about “Low Carb Recipes”, you might look at the top 10 LCHF (low carb high fat) sites, skim through existing articles and then write comments on those that have got a lot of engagement. Your post should contain extra resources, information, or even links to a low carb recipe you really like!
Not only will this drive qualified traffic to your website, but it will allow you to build relationships with other bloggers in your industry and at the same time interacting with their audience.
Additionally, it also makes it possible to keep a pulse on your market in order to effortlessly come up with brand new content ideas for your own blog. Plus, it’s really a smart tactic to put yourself in the line of sight of an authority blogger who recognizes you as a person who delivers similarly informative content!
Here’s what you should do:
Start with finding the top 10-20 blog sites in your industry, skim through the comments, and make sure you’re permitted to put clickable signatures (if you notice other people doing this, it’s safe to assume it is possible for you too).
Then simply, start leaving comments! Just be sure your comment gives value.
Answer the frequently asked questions, and provide the most value possible. Search for missing advice or information in the scope of the article. Additionally, complement the conversation with more information that will offer value and help the visitors get the most out of the article.
Tip: You should try to leave your comment as fast as possible. The earlier your comments appear under the article, the more visibility it’ll get since it’s not buried deep within other thoughts.
Forget SEO first and plan for the long term
Is SEO DEAD? How many times have you heard that lately?
Alright, I get it. SEO is much more difficult today, particularly for brand new websites.
However, it doesn’t mean it’s dead! The fact is you can’t count on generating traffic from search engines for the first couple of months of your blog’s life.
On the other hand, you just need to install your preferred SEO plugin, optimize every piece of your blog content, and after that let SEO proceed. Give it time until your content starts to rank.
Yup, I definitely recommend forgetting SEO on the whole!
Apart from standard optimization such as keyword research and placing those keywords into your title and content, don’t stress a lot about it.
No matter how much work and effort you put into it, your website isn’t likely to get good results from SEO at first. Therefore, simply stop thinking about it for now.
We’re going to check out several other traffic methods that will certainly give you results much quicker.
On top of that, those techniques will absolutely improve your SEO in the long run.
Consequently, not only will you get instant traffic that you could build your email list with, grow your social media following, as well as sell services and products, but you’ll skyrocket your search engine ranking over time, too.
A bunch of approaches we will go over involve social media, and because Google relies greatly on “social signals” nowadays, you will get search engine results faster applying the other techniques I'll explain.
Consider some additional traffic sources
When you’ve selected a primary traffic source, it’s time to pick some additional sources that’ll complement your strategy and generate extra traffic to your blog.
Your additional methods will likely be selected from the list in the primary traffic part, however, you might uncover some extra sources that are special to your market. In that case, you need to get those to the top of your additional options, or sometimes get them to be your primary sources if they deliver a ton of targeted visitors to your business.
Niche-specific traffic sources could be like online communities, Facebook groups, different social networks, and forums.
Another great technique for acquiring high quality traffic to your site is by benefiting from guest-blogging.
Guest blogging is probably the most convenient approach to create consistent traffic to your website, totally free. The only expense is your time. Better yet, guest-blogging on popular sites sets you in an authoritative place by simply being connected to an established blog in your area.
Therefore, how would you find guest posting opportunities? Use Google! Get started by using keywords like:
keyword guest blogging”
keyword “submit a guest post”
keyword “guest post by”.
keyword accepting guest posts”
By using the right search phrases, you can discover a lot of different guest blogging opportunities like the ones above. You can even find some great opportunities by looking at the backlinks of your competitor's blogs to see where they have published.
Tip: If you'd like to estimate the total traffic potential of a certain blog, use SimilarWeb to get a snapshot of the traffic.
And lastly, just one more high-powered traffic method involves positioning yourself as an authoritative source in your industry by engaging in user-generated content platforms including:
Look for questions and concerns in your niche area and reply by delivering value, along with a link to the article on your website.
How to encourage email sign-ups
I’ve previously mentioned the strategy of using a short valuable guide as a lead magnet to motivate visitors to subscribe to your email list, but there are also other actions you can take to get them to join up.
Let’s have a look at some other ways you could inspire more people, apart from using a short guide or another kind of content.
Discounts, coupons and special deals
One smart way to get visitors to sign up to your email list is to promote discounts, coupons, as well as other special deals. This may involve special deals for your own products, or even products owned by others, in case you can make them offer you a discount for your audience. It’s usually the most efficient if you use it with your own products when you have something special to market because you can get signups and sales.
Although, it may also work perfectly if you provide discounts on popular brands inside your niche.
Low-cost front end offer and upsells
Offer your prospects a huge initial discount on your first product, and next, compensate for it through a number of more expensive offers as they move their way throughout your sales funnel.
Example:
A cheap front-end offer might be the best way to connect with prospects and convert them into clients since you’re offering them a chance to try out your products and get to learn your brand and business without risk.
If you need a sales funnel tool, check out my best sales funnel builders guide.
Downloadable resources
Another excellent method to get folks to join your subscriber list is by promoting your articles and downloadable PDFs that are available offline. This might be very effective if you utilize a tool to automate the procedure.
Physical products
Physical items can definitely be a terrific way to grow your email list. For instance, a do-it-yourself and crafting website might promote a bracelet making package for the fee of shipping. Similarly, a survival site could offer a paracord bracelet for the fee of shipping.
One popular example:
It’s essential to choose something that:
It’s critical to let your visitors see that the product is free, but they need to pay for delivery and handling. This might enable you to make a tiny profit to pay you for the time it takes to ship the product.
When possible, consider getting something customized so that you can get your brand name printed on it. This might help folks remember you later on since they’ll be reminded of your brand name every single time they use that product.
You can discover really low-cost items, frequently sold in bulk, on sites like Alibaba and AliExpress. These things are normally from China, hence it usually takes one or two months to be delivered. This is exactly why you might want to purchase a lot of items ahead of time so that your customers won't have to wait very long.
Though, you can also decide to drop ship those goods to your customers. This will ensure you don’t need to pay initially for those, and you just put your order after your customers paid for them.
Giveaways and contests
Giveaways and contests are one of the most effective list-building strategies, and savvy marketers have already been using them for quite a long time to increase their subscriber lists.
Everybody really loves free materials, but not everybody is ready to spend money, even a couple of bucks for shipping, for a tiny, simple product. On the other hand, many people would give their email address for a shot at earning a bigger prize.
If possible, your giveaway product must be a thing that would certainly appeal to almost everyone within your target market. As an example, a recipe blog might hand out a stand mixer, or a set of kitchenware, or even a popular recipe book. An outdoor blog might hand out a sleeping bag, a tent, or camping cookware.
If you’re in a market that's a bit broader, you could share gift cards. This way, you don’t need to be concerned about shipping fees. Just simply buy a virtual gift card on Amazon or any other retail store and send the code to the winners in a newsletter.
Build a reward system
Incentives and rewards such as coupons, giveaways, and bonus items add more value to a consumer's purchase and that will beneficially affect visitor engagement.
It’s a clever method of catching attention, engaging visitors and increasing clicks and sales by simply rewarding clients who act now. You can also use an app to make viral social sharing campaigns, create buzz around future product launches and direct tons of targeted visitors to your blogs and landing pages.
Of course, choosing the best free landing page builder is also important.
Apply push notifications
Push notifications drive visitors back to your website, all on complete autopilot. By using push notifications, you can inform users that you’ve published brand-new content to your site the moment it goes live.
There are various push notification systems available on the internet, however, I recommend you use a service that gives real-time monitoring. As a result, you’ll be in a position to smoothly monitor your entire traffic and visitor response rates.
Increasing conversions
In case you really would like to get the best returns from your marketing, it’s essential to tweak and test the different elements so that you exactly know what works and what doesn’t.
This can involve every single thing from your website design, navigational areas and theme right down to the visuals and advertising placement or offers.
Though you can test various elements manually, I strongly recommend choosing an easy to use tool (split testing tool) that also simplifies the whole procedure.
Not only will this save you a huge amount of frustration and time, but it will provide you with much more accurate results than attempting to do it manually, particularly if you don’t have a large amount of traffic yet.
If you are struggling to see good results, either in email signups, traffic, social media followers, or product sales, analyzing various elements will allow you to discover issues and correct them instantly.
Blog marketing strategies: conclusion
In this guide, you’ve discovered plenty of highly effective methods that will help you increase traffic, convert your blog visitors into subscribers and even better connect with your audience.
Your following action is to set up a lead magnet on a squeeze page or a blog that will convert your visitors into prospects, providing you the chance to interact with them regularly and bring them to your blog every time.
Next, concentrate on your primary traffic generator so that you’ll have the ability to skyrocket subscriber rates easily and quickly.
Last but not least, build your social media presence that places you in front of your target market and allows you to position yourself as an expert in your niche.
I wish you the best of luck with your website!
