It takes a lot to have a successful blog. Your posts need to be well-written, helpful, and relevant to your pinpointed audience, but often the first question one has after you have developed content is which ways to advertise your blog will be most successful.
Remember, the inbound methodology isn’t about getting any visitor to your blog post or website, its about getting the right visitor. Sheer numbers is not going to make your blog successful for you blog.
Keywords are your best advertising campaigns
If you want your website to function as a tool in your marketing program you have to start in Google because that is where prospective customers will find you.
Keyword research is the most important tool in online marketing. The idea that if you write great content–they will come–is long gone. Utilizing the right keywords will make or break your website, and by researching keywords you learn which terms and phrases to target.
You want to use phrases for keywords (longtail keyword is the term if you want to get geeky), which mimic the language that your buyer personas or potential customers would use. Once you’ve picked a longtail keyword that is relevant and pertinent to your website, center your content around that keyword. Then optimize your page by putting that keyword in your URL, blog title, blog body, image alt-text, and meta description.
An email address is the call to action
Beyond providing helpful content, getting people to surrender their email address is the most important element of marketing your blog, because I can’t think of a better audience to advertise your blog content than to people who already have some interest in your business.
The biggest mistake we often see is that organizations tend to focus all their marketing effort on those who are ready to buy instead of those who are thinking of buying down the road.
Go were the numbers are
There is always a much larger percentage of people who are interested than people who are ready to buy. Your marketing goal is to get as many people who are interested to give you their email address.
If your email marketing startegy hits with enough frequency, you have greatly enhanced the possibility that someone will see you email when they are ready to act, or at the very least you will have built enough name recognition that they remember you when they are ready to act.
There are a lot of ways to advertise your blog, but start first with using the right key words and gathering email address and you will soon find that you are worrying less about advertising your blog because you are so busy managing your leads.
