Content Marketing Strategy For Your Blog

There are good number of blogs in the market, i.e. Web-market. The reason may be its high potential to earn, combined with low cost of start. You spend few dollars to own a domain and another few dollars to pay your hosting service provider. However, there are many blogs, which end up with a frustration of not attracting substantial traffic to their site. The main reason behind it is poor quality content and an absence of proper content marketing strategy.

What is content marketing? You need not to have a management of business administration degree to figure out the primary factor of any successful marketing. Yes, it is one of the many “P”s in marketing, the PRODUCT. In online blogging business, you are selling your product and your product is nothing but your blog content. Whatever excellent design you have for your site; whatever excellent strategy you adopt, you will not be able to survive without quality content.  Though, quality content doesn’t do any good, unless you have proper content marketing strategy.

Your blog readers are your customer and you need to sell your content to them. You may adopt different avenues to attract your customers through proper content marketing strategy.

Drive Traffic through search engines

First and foremost important way to route your customer is through search engine. Though there are number of search engines available in the market, Google is the major one followed by Bing and Yahoo. You have to target these three search engines at the least. To drive traffic from the search engines you must apply proper search engine optimization (SEO) technique. SEO itself is a very big topic and always changing to be in sync with the change of Google’s algorithm. To adopt SEO, you can go through different articles (including few posted here under category SEO) and then act accordingly. If you don’t have enough time or not comfortable in optimizing, you can engage some organization, which can help you in SEO. Additionally, you should update your blog frequently and submit your sitemap to all these search engines. Nowadays, Bing and Yahoo share the same webmaster.

Content marketing through social media

The social platform is becoming more important in the area of communication. Facebook is the major social platform, followed by Tweet, Linked In, Google+ etc. Where, people join this social platform to keep in touch with their acquaintances, the other objective is to keep oneself updated in all the areas of his\her interest. In facebook, you can have your personal or business page, which can serve as a platform for content marketing. You can invite your acquaintances to join your page and can gain publicity through this platform. Similar facility is also available in many other social platforms e.g. Tweet, Linked In, Google +, Scoop etc.  With social media in limelight and gaining importance continuously, you cannot ignore this avenue of content marketing.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing has got lots of popularity of late. But what is viral marketing? Suppose, you have said something interesting to one of your friends. He liked it and told it to his fiancée. And his fiancée liked it so much, she told it to all her friends. And this chain messaging keeps on going and spread it like a virus. This also holds true for your blog as well. If you can engage your customer, it is always possible that they share your post with his friends. Many people experienced fabulous result, when they successfully implement viral marketing.  Many bloggers provide “Give Away”, to “viral market” their content. So, you need to always have the Share button for the popular Social Medias next to your post. If, you are using any ready-made blogging platform Blogger, Wordpress etc, they already have the share button embedded next to your article. Otherwise, you may always have these buttons through some Plugins (Wordpress) or extension (Joomla).

Campaign

In the initial days, when you are not known to many people, you may need some publicity. As it is true for any product, it is also true for your website. Campaign always drives traffic to your site but you need to shell out some money for the same. You can have banner, advertisement block or just simple text to publicize your blog. You can opt to show these advertisements in whatever websites you want. But, it is always recommended to go for the sites aligned to your niche. We do have popular websites and also NOT so popular websites. Where the popular websites charge you more, they will be having very good traffic.  You need to keep a balance in the money that you are paying and the publicity that you gain through these websites. You also need to consider different options through which these websites charge you. There are fixed chargeable banner or pay per click or embedded text mode. Weigh between different options and check which will be most beneficial for you.

So which content marketing strategy has turned out to be most effective for you?

Photo courtesy Geoff Livingston