To blog without a specific goal or objective in mind is pointless. As a blogger, you’d want to set a standard on how your blog will turn out after a certain period of time.
Should you have thousands of subscribers receiving your newsletters?
Should the ability of your blog to convert your visitors into customers and achieve a specific sales figures be set as your metric?
Are you more interested in building relationships with your audience and have as many positive social proof as possible?
If any of the ones listed above happen to be your objectives, you should strive to make something out of your blog by following these actionable tips to build a winning campaign.
Content strategy
The creation of high-quality content will help you attract the right audience for your blog. To do this, you will need to set up a strong content strategy as the foundations of your blog.
This will allow you to identify your target keywords and audience, profile your buyer persona (if you are selling something through your blog), track competitors and see their strengths and weaknesses, and determine web properties and channels that you can leverage as you move forward.
Content marketing
Once you have this set up, you will need to schedule your posts with the help of an editorial calendar. This will allow you to set up blog posts ahead of time and spread them out throughout a quarter or so.
You will need to learn how to fashion your blog posts so that it is written and published under optimum levels. Therefore, learning the anatomy of a perfect blog post is a great place to start. From here, you will identify the major parts of a blog (headline, form, storytelling, images, and more).
SEO
Appeasing search engines by following the best on- and off-page optimization practices is one of the most cost-effective ways of drawing lots of traffic to your blog. You can then use the traffic to filter down your target market and get them to perform your desired action.
The fact that you are publishing content using a strong content marketing framework as mentioned above makes the job of getting your blog to rank for your keywords easier.
Conducting an SEO campaign is also made easier depending on the blogging platform you are using. For blogs powered by WordPress CMS, there are specificSEO tips for your WordPress blog with the help of plugins.
Social media
According to Forbes, social media has usurped SEO as the top referral traffic source for websites and blogs. If you’re not promoting your latest content using different social media platforms, make it part of your overall strategy the next time out.
Given that there are multiple social media sites out there that you can leverage for traffic, it’s best that you use management tools that lets you schedule posts in advance and view all your sites from a single dashboard. This should make your job of sharing your blog posts from this channel much easier.
Also, these tools lets you track and analyze how many clicks your social media posts got from specific sites. This way, you can leverage the data to determine which social media sites are most effective and which ones aren’t.
For example, if you got lots of referral traffic to your latest blog post from Facebook, you may want to boost your efforts in promoting on this channel. Conversely, social media sites that aren’t driving the numbers you want for your blog (based on the data provided by the management tool) can be dropped from your strategy until you can find a better way on how to use them as part of your promotional tactics.
Data analytics
To gauge how well your blog is performing given the effort you put in the aforementioned campaigns above, you need to track and measure your progress. This can be achieved by installing a code provided by popular analytics tools like Google Analytics or Clicky. These will give you better insights about the behavior of your visitors – whether they’re browsing other pages of your blog or bouncing away from it. Also, finding out the types of metrics to watch out for from your analytics tool will help you determine the problems that are preventing you from meeting your online goals.
Using the data gathered, you can improve your blog’s performance by editing your pages to make them stay longer in your blog and click on your site links.
Final thoughts
These tips should give you a better understanding on how you can build a blog that observes the best practices from different marketing strategies. By doing these, you are sure to achieve your online goals without a hitch!
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