How to Successfully Market Your Blog and Business

A vital part of gaining an excellent digital presence and achieving monetary success is knowing how to market your blog, online business, and yourself.

After all, if you do not market yourself properly, your targeted audience will not know where to find you or know that you even exist.

You want to optimize your exposure and attract people to see what you have to offer. Make them want to invest their time with you.

Marketing, in a nutshell, might seem straightforward – post on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. All good to go now, right? Think again, it actually involves a lot more in-depth thought and planning.

Understanding the fundamental elements of marketing and the different options you have are key. Plan a marketing strategy for your blog to make it successful in the competitive world out there.

Make Sure You Have Something of Value to Market

Before you begin investing in marketing methods, ensure that you have something worth marketing in the first place. You need a good base to work with.

For example, if a person goes to your blog for the first time, what will they see? Will they see a lot of meaty, high-quality, and valuable content? Or will they see one or two posts? I hope it’s the former and you have a lot of content to attract people and make them want to stick around. Otherwise, chances are your marketing will flop since there is not much content to read.

You will also want to market and position yourself as a topical authority in the space. Part of that means creating a topical map and content plan to give yourself the blueprint to show your authoritativeness and expertise in the space.

Are you here trying to figure out how to market yourself or leverage business branding? The same scenario applies.

Have a solid foundation and a good site that shows exactly who you are, what you do, and why people should follow and invest with you. Without that first, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Understand Your Target Audience

When I say to understand your targeted audience, I mean it. Get to know as much as possible. If you want to market your blog, you have to know who you’re marketing to.

You want to know much more than just their age group, demographics, and gender. You need to study their buying habits, their wants, desires, needs, and everything else in-between so you can have a leg up by providing them the solution to fill those voids.

Though Googling this stuff and reading statistics or studies is fine, for more knowledge, go out into the public and engage with them too. Send out surveys and take online polls to get the most insight as you can. If you’re on my email list, you should’ve seen the survey emails I send out! If you’re not on the email list, do sign up after you finish reading at the bottom of the post and you’ll get my surveys once in awhile.

Knowing this information will help you create your marketing campaigns so you can reach them easier and more effectively. This also gives you the upper hand in branding yourself for that specific audience.

Branding and Marketing Yourself for Your Target Audience

Think of some well-known companies.

Did Apple cross your mind? They have a huge fan base of all ages, genders, and personal beliefs. So how did Apple brand their company that speaks to such a diverse group? They took advantage of the common aspiration for cutting-edge and modern technology. This is why Apple has a very crisp, clean, and futuristic atmosphere. It speaks to so many people, yet still branded themselves to become one of the biggest companies today.

Apple also doesn’t go out trying to copy any other companies with their products. They look to create something different, something unique and memorable.

This is the same kind of focus you want to do as well. When you are branding your business, blog, or yourself, put your visions within a specific niche and revolve your mission around that look and feeling. Think about what makes you unique.

The better you brand yourself, the easier it will be for your audience to remember you and convert to loyal customers and followers. Your goal should be to establish a brand so well, your audience knows what to expect from you. When you launch marketing campaigns, people will know that your content or product will be of high quality, unique from others and most importantly useful to them.

For newbie audiences seeing your brand for the first time, your content should be concise, so they learn what you’re all about. They’re asking the question – Why should I follow you? You want to make sure you’re answering that question for them in an easy to find way.

Marketing Avenues to Utilize

Okay, so by this point, let’s say you have your business or blog all ready to go, your branding is top-notch, and you nailed down your targeted audience and what they want to see from you.

The next step is to market the heck out of your blog.

As noted earlier, this can be tricky, and there are several different approaches you can take. However, the not so little secret to achieving the most traffic and conversions is to do them all.

• Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing is something no one should overlook. Yes, you can use free hashtags on your personal accounts to target millions of people with the hope that they’ll notice you. But the best way to get noticed is to set up a branded username account. This segregates your personal profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. from your work ones. I talk about picking your brand name and checking username availability at the various social media sites on the Picking your Brand Name post. We’re just getting started. Your brand name and social media usernames are just a part of how to market your blog.
  
  
• Paid Advertising – Though social media can be free advertising, something to consider to reach more people is going the paid route. For example, Facebook Ads will help boost your marketing campaign to reach more people based on targeted audiences. Audiences where you select by choosing the demographics of who should see your ads and Facebook Pages. You can pay $5 a day or more, based on what your budget is and how many people you want to reach. This is a good way to get more followers and likes to your Facebook Page and blog. Don’t forget to also make sure you have something of value there that will keep them around. Read more about Facebook Ads on their site.
  
  Another option you can do paid wise is Google Ads. Though you may have heard of this being a source of income for a blog in the form of Google Adsense, those ads come from somewhere. By setting up your own ad, Google will display it on other sites for you to gain more traffic. You can read more about Google Ads on their website.
  
  
• Email Marketing – Whether you have a business email list or a blog subscription one, use that to your advantage. The cool thing about email marketing to help you generate your pitches is that you already know those people you are sending it to will be interested. They are on your email list for a reason, so you are much more likely to get positive engagement and feedback from them. Another tip to keep in mind is that because these people are probably already loyal customers or followers, the more personalized you make the emails, the better. Greeting them with their first name can make a world of difference. I use ConvertKit for my email marketing and able to build, write, personalize, send and track emails. Check out ConvertKit yourself by creating a free account to test out.
  
  
• Other Marketing Methods to Consider – There are so many marketing methods that you can use. It really depends on your business and what it is that you are trying to sell. For instance, if your business sells a teeth whitening kit, then a commercial, billboard, or even a magazine ad could help you out with that. On the other hand, if you are a blogger just looking for more traffic to gain a passive income, then those sources might not be ideal. You would want to stick more with social media, paid advertising, and email marketing.
  

Conclusion

Marketing is necessary when you’re looking to scale a business, get yourself noticed, and gain online blogging traffic.

Yes, SEO helps to increase traffic organically as we’ve discussed in the Creating SEO Rich Content for Your Blog Posts. SEO is certainly something that is highly important, but it’s also important to market your blog to gain more traffic. Set up a marketing strategy and execute it the best you can.

It is not easy to get noticed in such a saturated business and online marketplace. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get it right. When you start out marketing, you may find some kinks that need to be ironed out, and that is okay. It is all a part of the journey and the learning process.

Take time to plan and genuinely invest in your business or blog. Analyze your marketing strategies and audiences, and create solutions to fill societal demand gaps. If you do all of this, then you should have nothing to worry about. You’ll be on your way to starting to generate passive income from affiliate marketing.

Handy recap to keep in mind when planning your marketing strategy for success.