While blogging is an interesting hobby that can even become your main source of income if you put some effort into it, it still requires a lot of hard work. The real challenge begins not when you start your blog and write a few first posts, but when you actually start building up your loyal audience. Simply being dedicated, monitoring the blogging trends and updating regularly is not enough to run your blog smoothly: you have to build a certain strategy and stick to it.
Lucky for you, there are actually only a few things you need to focus on. These include ocial media, quality of your content, emails, trends and statistics.
Today, I’m going to tell you more about them, allowing you to create your own system of running your blog smoothly.
Social media
Even if your posts are amazing, they’re useless if no one can find them. That’s what you need social media for. Social media platforms help people find you, share your articles and ideas, recommend you to friends, and so on.
To create a correct social media strategy, try to imagine your potential audience. What is it like? Maybe it consists of young people who spend most of their time online on Twitter, or maybe it mostly consists of active Facebook users. This is especially important to understand if you don’t have much time to spend on social media. Having this information lets you focus on a single platform and update the others when you have time for it.
However, social media can be used not only for sharing your new posts. If you update your blog once a week, this means that your social media accounts will look quite empty the rest of the week. Try sharing other interesting information, or create other types of content (for example images, videos, etc.). This way, your followers will stick to your social media accounts. After all, they’ll be able to find something there that isn’t posted on your blog.
Content
The content is what brings people to your blog. That’s why it has to be interesting and valuable to the readers. Focus on making your content as high-quality and unique as possible. Don’t forget that this is even more important than regular updates and this has to be a priority. If you have to choose between updating your blog more often and making the content more interesting, choose the latter.
Researching your niche and what your competitors are up to is an extremely important part of the whole blogging process. You have to do your research well and repeat it few times a month in order to see what your competitors can offer and which blogging trends exist on the web. This will allow you to respond to these trends with your content and to avoid unintentional plagiarism.
See Also: How To Find The Best Topic For Your Blog
Analytics
If you want to run your blog smoothly, you need to understand which of your methods work well and which don’t. This will allow you to optimize them and to adjust your strategy according to the preferences of your audience.
Analytics is the main tool that can help you with that. It allows you to understand where your audience is coming from, how much time they spend on your website, which posts they like the most and so on. Lucky for you, there’s an easy way to go about it. All you need to do is to use the Google Analytics service and to learn how to work with it.
It is important not only to analyze the effectiveness of your blog but also to make it more effective. That’s why you should learn more about the latest SEO trends and try to incorporate them in your blog. However, be sure not to overdo it. If your posts are overloaded with keywords, readers will notice it and this can turn them away.
See Also: 5 Proven Strategies That Can Massively Increase Blog Traffic
Email offers
Even now, despite the development of social media, emails still remain the most effective marketing tool. Don’t hesitate to use that tool for your blog promotion and remember, those who subscribe to your blog are your most loyal readers.
However, if you don’t have an email list yet and want people to subscribe, you have to offer them something valuable. Yes, many people do subscribe simply because of new posts notifications, but you’ll be surprised how much this number could increase if you offer something more interesting for everyone who’ll subscribe, for example, an eBook.
It’s important to repeat such offers from time to time, changing the content every time, instead of doing this only once. This way you’ll be able to keep the existing subscribers as well as attract new ones.
What is even more important is learning how to integrate all these things mentioned above into your blogging strategy. Learning more about them is one thing but learning how to use them is another.
To do so, you need to spend some time thinking about these things. Which strategies will benefit your blog immediately and which ones will do so only with time? Which ones are the easiest to do and which ones require more time and effort to understand and implement them? Answering these questions will help you set your priorities. You will see what you have to focus on first and what can be done later. Maybe your content is good enough already but you have no idea about how to use Google Analytics. It’s time to figure this out.
After you do so, write down the main things you need to add to your marketing strategy and try to add them to your blogging schedule. For example, if you want to focus on social media, don’t forget to schedule the nearest updates and find some time to learn more about the most popular types of social media content in your niche. And if you need to focus on emails, try finding time to read some guides and to learn how to write emails better.
I hope that this article will help you and inspire you. Good luck with your blog!
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Sig Nordal 