You’ve found your niche, you created a stunning website design, you wrote your first posts – now it’s time to market your blog! Luckily, this IS a task you can tackle on your own.
While it may be worth investing in a digital agency once your blog gains traction – especially if you’re hoping to transform it into your fulltime career – promoting your website and your content autonomously doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
We rounded up 3 easy tips that will help you market your blog across multiple channels with minimal energy and maximum results.
- Pick The Perfect Social Media Channels
Social media is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to market your blog to thousands of people across the world. However, there is a bit more that goes into social media marketing than creating an Instagram account and calling it a day.
First and foremost, there are far too many social media channels in the world for you to successfully maintain a presence on all of them by yourself. Therefore, spend some time looking into each platform and what it offers. For example, Instagram is incredibly popular, but its algorithm necessitates high-resolution images and tons of engagement to crack into newsfeeds, yet provides minimal links to your website. Therefore, if photography isn’t your strong suit and/or you’re hoping to drive traffic to your blog, perhaps Facebook is a better bet for promotion.
Finally, don’t be afraid to branch out into less conventional social media sites. Quora, Reddit and StumbleUpon all have the potential to drive hundreds – if not, thousands – of users to your site each month and are worth exploring.
- Create A Consistent Tone
Once you have your blog’s editorial calendar down pat and pick the social media accounts that are right for you, make certain that those separate identities match. No, this doesn’t mean you need the exact same sentences everywhere. But it DOES mean that the overall style and tone in what you write and the media you share should be consistent – like a mini brand identity. If you’re all over the place (like humorous on Facebook, but formal and serious on your blog) you won’t be able to fully connect with your target demographic, and all of your marketing efforts will be moot.
Going off of the idea of consistency, create regular publication schedules for both your blog posts AND your social media posts. Followers crave consistency and your content across the board will do better when users know when to expect it.
Not sure where to start? Try small, easy numbers, like twice a day on Facebook (morning and night, evenly spaced out) and once a day on Instagram. There are plenty of programs, such as Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social, that can help you schedule your content in advance and hone your overall strategy.
- Implement SEO Best Practices
You don’t need to go into SEO overdrive when you’re first starting a blog, but it’s a wise idea to form some good habits around SEO best practices – that way, when the time comes to step it up, you won’t need to backtrack. Plus, in the meantime, your blog will still be discoverable while climbing in search rankings.
A few easy tricks to implement are:
- Tag post headlines and subheads as H1 and H2s in your admin panel (most hosting platforms such as WordPress have easy toggles for this).
- Ensure every photograph has an Alt Image Title.
- Interlink to various posts and pages of your blog within articles.
The final point, interlinking, is particularly important for SEO and an easy way to gain traction. However, it’s important to ensure that every link makes sense for the reader – don’t just through a random link in there that doesn’t A). fit with the content, and B). match the keywords you’re linking.
Conclusion
While it may seem daunting at first, it IS possible to market your blog all on your own. So long as you keep a consistent brand identity, post regularly on social media and utilize basic SEO practices, you’ll be on your way to huge readership in no time.
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