Marketing your Blog

Recently I overheard a conversation that went, “I’ve been blogging for the past year and so far have received just three comments.” Does this sound familiar to you? There are many among us who are genuinely great writers with vivid sense of imagination – all key ingredients for the perfect blog. And yet, there’s hardly anybody reading the blogs. In fact, I’d wager a month’s salary that the World’s best written blogs have yet to be discovered.

At the cost of my colleagues accusing me of giving off too much information (I think society deserves a few freebies), here’s my blog on how you can market your blog and garner page views, comments and favorable reviews.

For the uninitiated, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and basically refers to steps you or your SEO Consultant takes to promote content over the internet. If successful, the result would be that your blog will ‘catch the eye’ of the search engines and would be listed early on in the results. As you might guess, a listing on page 1 of the search engine results will likely garner more visits and page views. And no, it does not require a degree in rocket science in fact, if you use Word Press for your blogging, then the entire SEO process becomes even simpler. I’ll explain how in a bit.

Here are the key ingredients to a successful blog:

No amount of SEO or internet marketing is going to help if the quality of your writing is poor. If you think your writing is not up to the mark, acquire the services of online ghost writers – they are usually good and relatively cheap (under $10/page). If you can’t find one, contact me and I will help you.

Good writing is important because people who read blogs and online articles tend to be highly literate. Nothing is more bothersome and irritating than spelling and grammatical mistakes. People get put off by it and the likelihood of them revisiting your blog is remote.

You should also know who your target audience is. This is important because your writing style should cater to the target audience. For example, a blog meant for adolescents or teenagers cannot be written the same way as a blog meant for (say) doctors or businessmen. You also need to pay heed to the geographical location of the target audience. If your audience is truly global, stick to either American or UK English – both works fairly well for global audiences.

If your blog is about the latest welding machines be sure to actually use the words “latest welding machine” so that people searching for latest welding machines might read your blog. The words “latest welding machines” needs to be written 4 or 5 times throughout the blog. No more and no less. Ditto for any other keywords you need to use.

Enter a one sentence description of the content. In the case of this example, something like “Model EB87XXX – the Latest Welding Machine by World Welding Machines” should do nicely. Notice how it captures the gist of the content and has keywords in it.

Think sections in a shopping mall. People visit specific sections depending on their needs. Select one or at most two categories. Selecting more will not help your marketing effort. Remember, categorization is meant more for humans than the search engine.

Blog readers and search engines will revisit your blog site frequently only if you add content regularly.

Marketing

Read blogs by other writers and comment intelligently.  Spamming will not help. Insert a genuine comment and you can end with “by the way, I too blog on welding machines and have recently written a blog on Model EB87XXX – the Latest Welding Machine by World Welding Machines. You can read it at (url)”.

You can also mention something similar on your Facebook (and other social media) pages. You have to blow your own trumpet but remember to not overdo it.

I wish you all success with your blog. Don’t forget to write in with your experiences on how you were successfully (or unsuccessfully) marketing your blog. Your comments are always welcome.