Blog Tips, Blogging, Blogging Success, Marketing Tips |
Grow Any Business with Blog Marketing
A blog is one of the most popular terms in business and social media today. The term generated years ago and has taken its stance as one of the most effective marketing tools around. In the beginning, blogs were viewed or used as an online diary, which gave a text account of the lives and activities of people. Bloggers were limited in numbers early on because, in order to launch a blog, it was required to build a website. A few years later, platforms were developed that made the process easier, which made it possible for almost anyone to create a blog.
Blogs vs. Websites
There is a difference between a blog and a website. Other than the degree of visitor or audience engagement, blogs are typically joint forces with social media. Visitors are permitted to post comments and interact with the owners of the blog. Blogs are updated more often than websites. Once a website is developed and launched, it’s usually permanent. Information, data, and images are added to blogs on a regular schedule. Bloggers will add info that their audience wants to read about.
Contemporary and traditional entrepreneurs utilize blogs as an effective marketing tool. They use it as a source to give information to clients and potential clients as a means to attract more business. Blogs have evolved into one of the most operative marketing strategies of 2018.
Understanding Blog Marketing
Blog marketing communicates to the target audience of your business via the content of a blog. Before, many business owners kept an independent blog that was not a part of their site. Today, it is most effective to link the two for easier operation and management. This also simplifies access for visitors. Blogs and websites can be successfully managed using an engine such as the WordPress platform. The increasing popularity of blogging has created an increase in business for many website owners. When visitors land on a webpage, a blog is one of the first things tabs they look for. Once they find this, they immediately go to the blog to see its content. Therefore, it is essential to not only have a blog but to have one that contains amazing content.
Utilize Blog Marketing to Promote Services and Business
Creating a plan for blog marketing is one of the smartest moves a business owner can make. This takes a matter of minutes and with continuous management, it will bring success to the business. Marketing will take time but if incorporated properly, it will be effective and have a positive impact on the business.
Here are a few ways to approach blog marketing.
- Develop a blog marketing strategy or plan. Decide what type or genre of information you will post and share from your blog. Consider the best time of day to post and how often to do so.
- Create the blog. Choose a platform for blogging, set It up, and customize it to match the personality and size of the business. Incorporate your business logo into the blog to maintain uniformity. When utilizing free platforms, make sure that the domain name leads to the blog to allow consumers to reach the site without issue.
- Add multiple posts immediately. Don’t launch the blog until at least eight to ten blog posts have been added. Your audience doesn’t want to visit a site that has only one blog post. Once the initial batch of posts has been added, start a regular posting schedule for the blogs.
- Promote the blog. It is essential to integrate social media into the blogs, which will allow your posts to reach your followers and their friends. Remember to always add your blog to the marketing tools you use to promote your business.
- Interact with your audience. Readers will post comments, ask questions, and give their opinions on your posts. Interact with them when necessary to generate more activity on the post.
- Utilize the blog to motivate email signups. Visitors will continuously return to your blog when you offer incentives for them to give their email address. Email offers are great tools to encourage business from potential and current clients.
Blogs are a primary source for marketing because they provide fresh and informative content that readers want to know about. It encourages them to return and presents an effective way for consumers to network with the business. Blog marketing is not only effective, but it’s cost-efficient which is another reason more businesses rely on it for business growth.
This article was originally posted on Mom Marketing Coach.
Blog Tips, Blogging, Blogging Success, Marketing Tips |
Maximize Your Blog Results With These Tips!
Seven days in a week and on each of those days, more than a million blog posts are created. These posts include videos, content, photos and more. Posting content that is minimal and without character will not help you achieve the results you expect as a blogger.
Business growth is inspired or motivated by quality content that engages your readers. Remember, your post is competing against millions of others that are published. While genres may vary, many readers are drawn to unfamiliar genres simply because of the quality of their content and the amazing character and appeal that the images display.
If you spend a few hours of each day, researching, developing, and writing content, you are on the fast-track to becoming a full-time blogger. Publishing weekly posts can be quite overwhelming. It is less draining if blogging is your passion, but the need to create quality content is important, along with a few other strategies.
The purpose or intent of the blog has a huge impact on the tone and pitch of it. Generation of sales, providing useful information, and encouraging interactions are a few reasons that motivate bloggers to create posts. To develop or improve sales, bloggers should post quality content more often.
Businesses may see a vast improvement in sales if the quality of the content is above average. There are many other bloggers that are breaking stride by creating blogs that everyone wants to read. What makes their posts better? What causes people to navigate towards other blogs and away from yours? What are you missing or doing wrong? The answers to these questions will vary among bloggers. There is not a single formula to help you get it right with every post. Changes in marketing and social media engagement occur from day to day, and it’s easy to lose track of what works and what doesn’t.
Here are a few tips to help maximize the results yielded by your blog posts and help your posts to shine among the millions of others that are published daily.
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Create a Strategy
Treat your blog like you would a business, especially if your plan is to generate income. Therefore, you should document your strategy by writing it down and following it as planned. It is essential for any successful business to create an outline of their goals, plans, marketing strategy, and projected outcome. Blogs require a similar effort and the concept is similar.
Bloggers should have an objective from which they can develop a mission statement. This statement is the foundation for completing things such as social media posts, outreach content, emails, and more. Content strategy and documentation are important tools for effective marketing of your blog.
Documentation of the following is ideal for building a successful blog:
- Plan your topics – prepare a month ahead by creating a plan for the type and topics of the content you will post. At times your brain will be cloudy. You will have vague ideas by may be unable to bring them to the surface. There are blog idea generators available to assist with ideas for blog topics. Utilize these tools to create interesting and eye-catching topics that appeal to readers. Organize a list of 10-15 topics for the month and add them to the calendar on the scheduled dates to post.
- Add to Google Calendar – add a topic to your calendar and work to ensure that it is out by that date. Abide by this schedule. Treat it like a deadline for an exam or academic paper. It is important to create a strict process of documenting important to-dos, as it is easy to allow other tasks to side-track you and get you off schedule. Schedule daily writing totals according to the number of posts you have scheduled each month. Remain consistent in your writing and always commit to complete the daily requirement.
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Create Content that is Long-Form
Once you’ve documented and scheduled your posts, it’s time to begin writing. Be creative, consistent, and diligent in your writing. Short posts will not deliver the quality and informative content that readers look for in blogs. Write, read, rewrite, and read the post again. Make sure that you are pleased with the content and confident that others will find it engaging and informative.
When creating long-tail content, don’t lose the reader by adding fluff throughout the piece. Doing so diminishes the quality of the content and is not informative to readers. Most potential readers will not finish the piece and in many cases, never attempt to read your blog again. Create a blog post that performs and calls for action when necessary. Performance data and information that guides can rarely be written in less than 2,000 words. Research suggests that longer and more detailed blogs generate almost ten times more leads than short-form posts. Consider this for an example, posts that hold the 10th position in rankings of internet searches are longer than 1,500 words. You can’t afford to write less than this and expect to compete with high-performance blog posts.
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Implement Video into the Post
Online and social media video enhances a blog post tremendously. YouTube content is a prime example with more than a billion viewers logging in to view uploaded content. There is more than an hour of content viewed by each viewer daily. This is a key indicator that images and videos are positive additions to your blogs. Create a YouTube channel and use it to filter traffic through to your blog. The addition of videos is a primary method for increasing engagement and holding the interest of viewers longer. Remember to utilize a call-to-action in video posts and you will notice an increase in shares of your content.
These are just a few tips to help you reorganize or enhance your blogging strategy. There are many additional strategies that should be implemented with the above tips to successfully reach your maximum blogging potential.
This article was originally posted on Mom Marketing Coach
Copyright: niroworld / 123RF Stock Photo
Blog Tips, Blogging, Blogging Success |
Beginner On-Page SEO for New Bloggers
SEO can be complex but having the beginning steps easily written out is a great way to start. Here are some basic on-page tips that can help get you started.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is basically how you set up your website page or blog post using certain tactics to make your website more search engine friendly.
What steps should I complete on every blog post?
Before you even begin to write, there are a few things to think about.
Content
- Content – your posts should be a minimum of 750 words but Google prefers 1,000 – 1,500 words per post/article.
- Value of your content. What will you write about that will help solve another persons problem? Or, if your content is purely a story of experiences, how do you keep the readers attention?
- Keywords – if you are trying to be found, what keywords are people searching?
Keywords
You have a post idea, now let’s do some keyword research. We will use the topic of teeth whitening for example. If you are a product reviewer and want to post about teeth whitening, you need a more specific keyword as teeth whitening is a highly competitive term which would be hard to rank. You will need to go after the low hanging fruit. This is where long tail keywords come in. A long tail keyword is just a longer version of the keyword you are trying to rank. Here are a few examples of teeth whitening:
- How teeth whitening pens work
- Which teeth whitening method is best
- Legitimate teeth whitening reviews
A great place to find topic ideas is AnswerThePublic.com. Another way is to search on Google. Start writing a keyword and you will see Google auto-suggest what others are searching for. See the screenshot below:
If your topic is popular, you may be able to scroll down in the search results and find a list of questions that people also ask.
Then, scroll to the bottom of the search result page and you will find searches related to.
Now that you have some keyword ideas, you may want to check how competitive they are. I use an extension for Google Chrome that is called keywords everywhere. I believe you can use it in Firefox as well. Every time you do a search you will see the information in the red box and the yellow (screenshot below). It will provide search volume, competitiveness, and other keyword ideas. A “1” means that it is very competitive. Stay away from those exact terms although the search volume is appealing. You will want to find keywords that have a lower search volume and less competition.
On-Page
Now that you have your content written, it’s time for your on-page SEO. If you are using WordPress, get the Yoast plugin or another SEO plugin. I use Yoast. If you do not use WordPress, there should be SEO options available that you will want to use.
On-page keywords
You should have a few keywords in mind that you want to use. You don’t want to over-optimize so here are some tips on the use of keywords.
- Use your primary keyword in your title if possible
- Use your primary keyword in your header but change the wording (example further below)
- Use your keywords a few times in your content but change them around. Here is a good tool that you can use to check your keyword density: http://www.visiospark.com/keyword-density-checker/
Yoast
There are a few important things that you should utilize with Yoast. Some people believe that they need a good Yoast Score to fully optimize, but the truth is that you do not. For example, I do not fill in the focus keyword. There is nothing wrong with filling it out, but I prefer not to because I don’t want to focus on just one keyword. I like to use multiple keywords. The things I always fill out are the Title, slug and meta description.
Here is how I fill in my Yoast settings for a blog post that I have on my Midlife Single Mommy blog:
My primary keyword for this post is “mistakes singles should avoid on social media”. This is a long tail keyword and also happens to be the title of my blog post. You will see that I have the keyword in the title and in the slug. The slug is another name or your URL (website page address). If you can get your keyword into your slug, you should.
See, although a long tail keyword with little to no search volume, I am ranking nationally in position #5!
I do not recommend having the same exact keyword in the meta description as well although you can reword it if you would like.
Headings
Headings help Google bot understand what your page is about. As you will see below, the text before the post is large and explains the title but the words are mixed in a different way. This is an H1. Below the next paragraph is a bold title for the following paragraph, this is an H2. These are set up right above in the settings area. You may see the word “paragraph”. That is where you change it to be a header.
Categories and Tags
Make sure you have categories set up for your blogs to keep them organized by topics. In addition, be sure to add tags. These should be keywords related to the post. You can add as many as you would like but I try to stay under 10.
Images
Now that you are ready to post, do not forget to add an image or two and optimize it. What I mean by optimizing a picture is to add an “alt attribute” with a keyword. Here is the picture that I used for this post and the alt text that I added:
Internal Linking
Make sure you link to your home page, contact page and/or another blog post. If you can add an outgoing link (a link that points to an external website) do that as well. See how I have a few links throughout this post? That’s what I mean.
Double check your work before posting and send it to be indexed using your webmaster tools. If you do not have webmaster tools, learn how to set that up.
While this post may be a little basic, I will be offering detailed, over-the-shoulder, video training on how to optimize and rank your blog in the near future. There are big changes for 2019 that you don’t want to miss!! Please sign up to my mailing list to get updates for when the training goes live. I also offer services, like keyword research for example, to bloggers. Check out my services page to learn more!
This article was originally posted on MomMarketingCoach.com
Photo Copyright: designer491 / 123RF Stock Photo
Blogging, Blogging Success, Marketing Tips |
You’ve been blogging for a while now, but where are your followers? Let’s find the answer to the question many bloggers ask at the start of their blog career.
If we were to do a poll of every blogger that started their blog and quit before they succeeded, you would be shocked. The easiest part of running a blog is saying the word, “BLOG”, the more you say it, the easier it becomes. That’s sort of how blogging works. The more you blog, the easier it is to do so.
One of the biggest dilemmas most bloggers encounter is difficulty in acquiring followers. It has a little to do with the misconception that “if you blog, followers will come”. This isn’t exactly true. The partial truth is that if you’re consistent with it, eventually you will gain followers. How long will it take? How many will you get? How long will they stay? These are all questions that many new bloggers ask. The answer is simple. Diligence, quality, and patience! These are the ingredients for gaining followers for your blog.
Dare to be Diligent
Starting your blog is the easy part, it’s the work that goes into maintaining it that will prove challenging. Create content that has good quality and relates to your intended audience. Make regular posts and don’t forget to share on your social media pages. Be mindful of the type of content you post to personal pages. Many people will base their decision to follow your blog on the feeling they get from your personal posts. Posting inappropriate images, profanity and other rude comments could destroy your image in the blog world, unless this is the type of audience you want to attract. Here are a few tips:
- Network/connect with other bloggers
- Expand your relationships to include bloggers of all genres
- Treat blogging as a new business instead of a hobby
The Quality Connection
Connect with quality people and create quality content. Don’t attempt to lure followers in by posting click baits or material that lacks quality. People appreciate the good information and they will keep coming back for more of it. Most importantly, they’ll tell their friends about your blog and those friends will tell their friends and before you know it, your blog will be the talk of blogger nation. Research the information before you post it and talk about those things that interest you most. It’s easy to write about things you have a genuine interest in and not a forced interest. If you like to eat, write about food. Like to drink? Blog about the coolest drink recipes. There are always others out there that want to learn more about the things you’re blogging about. Here are a few tips to extract quality and add it to your blog:
- Share posts from other bloggers
- Utilize social media scheduling tools
- Publish quality images and tasteful memes
Practice Patience
So, you started your blog three days ago and are freaking out because you haven’t gained 10,000 followers. Stop! Reverse right there and pick up a load of patience, because you will need it. As mentioned in the beginning, many bloggers have started and quit, due to not gaining the followers they felt they should within a certain amount of time. There is no formula to deliver followers. There is the option to buy them, but we don’t even want to entertain that idea (that’s another post for another time). Blogging takes a great deal of patience. Once you’ve executed the diligent approach, applied the quality content, you must be equipped and fully-loaded with patience. Sometimes, it takes an overflow of it. Allow your blog time to blossom into the platform you desire it to me. Don’t overextend yourself or your efforts to the point of becoming fatigued and wanting to give up. Here are a few tips to remember:
- Learn from your mistakes
- Listen to other more experienced bloggers
- Don’t obsess over your blog; break away to do other things
Apply these simple techniques to your blogging journey and the followers will develop at a healthy rate. It’s important to understand that your blog isn’t for everyone. But for every person that doesn’t read it, there are two to three more who will. Be prepared for the take-off, as it will require much more of your time once the followers grow. Keep pushing, don’t quit and enjoy life as a blogger!
Originally posted on Mom Marketing Coach
Blog Tips, Blogging Success, Marketing Tips |
Moms Finding Success as a Blogger
To clear the smoke screen before it develops, there’s no other way to be a mom than doing it full-time. It’s what we eat, breathe, sleep and most of all, it’s what we love. There are other areas in life that bring us fulfillment and perhaps helps us to become even better mothers.
Most mommy bloggers have found this to be a tool of emotional, personal and professional completion. The benefits can be small or enormous, but for most, it is somewhat rewarding. A celebratory moment for many bloggers is the moment they discover their passion can actually become a successful career that doesn’t take them away from their children, family, and other important life issues at the most critical times.
The Beginning
Think back to the days when blogging was just a thought or a desire you had but were afraid to go after. Remember the times when you were only reading the blogs of others wondering how they managed to pull it all together. Oh, what’s that? This is you right now, at this very moment? Well, guess what? You’re at the peak of your success as a blogger.
The fear that you feel in the pit of your stomach is the fuel that will cause you to pour every ounce of your creativity, personality, and experience into your blog. You are building your blog based on that one thing or things that you are passionate about. You will base your posts, research, and videos on experience, relationships, failures, and successes. People will respond to your blog based on the effort and compassion you put into it. As passionately as you read the blogs of others, you must pour into your own. You become a successful blogger when you’re not only blogging for others but to fulfill your very own desire to get things done.
Let’s take an up-close look at a few ways to grow your blog into a full-time success.
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Time Management
Let’s begin by removing the false concept that to be successful as a blogger, you must work at it 24 hours per day! Doctors, teachers, lawyers, military personnel and many others are successful, and they have personal lives that reflect that success. It is crucial to managing your time effectively as a blogger. Make schedules and stick to them. Coordinate calendars for kid’s school, extracurricular activities, social gatherings, family time and mother. If it must be done, it needs to be added to the calendar. Designate specific hours of the day that are dedicated to efforts toward your blog. It doesn’t have to be the same hours each day or the same number. It is wise to set a goal of hours per week, allocate those hours and work to achieve it.
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Realize the Consequences
This is one of the most important steps to becoming a successful blogger. Create boundaries for yourself and most importantly, for others. NEVER allow anyone to downplay the importance of your commitment as a blogger, especially if this is your career. Everyone reads blogs, but not everyone appreciates the work that goes into them. During those preselected hours of research, posting or reviewing, do not let others convince you to put it off until later. Most importantly, you must advocate for your position harder than anyone else. It’s easy for your friend to run out for lunch and ask you to join her for an hour, but if it’s not your lunch hour, it simply won’t work! The end result could easily be you postponing your blog contribution time to later regret it because you’re behind schedule. Your friend will eagerly meet you during her lunch hour but will return to work on time, because she knows the consequences of failing to do so. As a blogger, realize there are consequences for your actions also.
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Create Quality Content
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is falling victim to the click-bait trap. You begin to lose yourself and everything that motivated you to start blogging in the first place. There is a load of viral content out there and it seems everyone is reading it. Well, you’re right! People do read it, but they recognize it for what it is, viral. It spreads quickly, has no valuable substance and eventually fades away. As a mom blogger with valuable insight and information that others want and need to hear, create quality content. Use valuable sources and always accredit those sources for their contribution. Take tips from other bloggers who have grown successful over the years.
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Expand Your Product Line
Blogging is not a one-way street. There are many avenues that lead to many places in the world of blogging. Professional services, products, crafts and much more can become a part of your blog. This is a major part of growing the following of your blog. It requires strategy and marketing concept but can be done effectively. This is another step in the process of success that many bloggers discover as they grow. It doesn’t matter at what rate you grow, the point is to grow consistently.
As a mom and a blogger, I know and understand the challenges that present themselves. I know how easy it is to give into anxiety and fear of not gaining immediate success. Most importantly, I also know how easy it is to turn all those fears and anxieties into the ammunition you need to help your blog grow in the direction you would like to see. There are no overnight success stories to be told and no magic potion to help you succeed. But there is a process to your success as a blogger and a full-time mom, and I’m excited to help you grow into your best years as a blogger!
This article was originally posted on Mom Marketing Coach.com May 2018
Photo Copyright: marysmn / 123RF Stock Photo
