Strategies to Grow Your Blog in 2008
Your blog is like a baby, you nurture it, feed it daily, take care of it when it is sick and watch it go to sleep every single night…yes, my friend – blogs are addicting. It is 2008, time to build readership, and begin to grow your brand’s awareness through the social media channels. As popularity has grown in blogs, and blogging, there are some key steps you can take to market your blog and grow effective strategies to increase readership.
Here are some key strategies for growing your blog in 2008:
Bring your Blog Home: One tactic to consider when trying to harbor more traffic, that will almost always work, is to localize your blog. Targeting a specific market and reaching out to them, using their language, all is a great way to reach more outlets. Localization allows you to cover topics that competitors probably won’t take the time to cover…something that should be considered when considering new material to write about.
Have Others Write It: User generated content is a great way to expand your blog’s reach. You can ask the public to submit articles that you feel might benefit your blog’s purpose and publish them accordingly. This can be gained by seeking out online writers, using article PR services to get content, and affiliating with other blogs in your field.
Start A Forum: A forum is great way to let your users interact with each other. You want reasons for your audience to come back to your blog, socialize, and interact with each other online. A forum is a great tool that will encourage this. By creating this outlet, you create a magnet for your users, which encourage them to return to your brand daily.
Start a Newsletter: Newsletters are an excellent way to reach an audience with information that differs from your blog. Depending on your product, newsletters are almost necessary to keep your customers returning. Newsletters are an excellent way to send out narrow messages, or more concentrated, to your audience. Create a weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly newsletter to connect to your followers. One of the great advantages a newsletter has is being able to monetize it in several ways (advertising, premium content), as well work them into effective methods for capturing leads.
Social Media Anyone: Social Media Optimization starts with social bookmarking. Creating an outlet for other readers to take your content and submit it, talk about it, or even blog about it in the social media channels will ultimately grow your traffic. Allowing applications like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and countless other social news websites, can help disseminate your information to a target user. Open up accounts in these channels and begin the process yourself, befriend the influencers in each channel and begin to watch your content wind its way through the Internet, and leads grow on your blog or website.
New Writers: New writers can be a great way to bring a new ‘voice’ to your blog. Otherwise, a change of pace. Just remember, when you pay someone per an article, make sure they are the best at what you need. Don’t bring in writers who are unsure and could question your blog’s voice, keep it lively, bring in TALENT, and then you can pay more attention to marketing the blog instead.
Premium Content: This is a great way to further monetize a blog. Premium content refers to exclusive content that is not made public to everyone and anyone who may fall upon your website. Create member only pages inside your blog that you can tie to subscriptions and promote alongside your free content. One suggestion I do have, when you do this, please make sure the content is original and most likely can’t be found anywhere else – it is what makes it PREMIUM!
Other Blogs Like You Too: Working with people in your industry can bring surprising results. Collaborating with other bloggers in your practice would be done to initiate some sort of social network possibly, large writing projects, online applications, awards, and contests. This helps build your brand and drive specific traffic to your website.
Videos & Podcasts: Consider video blogging, as a new tactic to your approach. Your content can reach an entire new audience through some major social video websites like YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, and other high traffic video websites. Podcasting works the same way, obviously your hearing instead of visually applying yourself. Viral video marketing also falls into this category, and should not go overlooked. You will be surprised how much traffic and new conversions you see using this technique.
Overall, in 2008, be creative! High quality editorial content will keep audiences interested, however, building a supportive audience and broadening your distribution channels will only help the original cause. Expanding your blog through some of these channels will increase your user participation, create new delivery channels, grow your reputation and influence the audience around you.
Get Blogging!!
