It’s not surprising that you decided to dedicate yourself to work in the world of web. Perhaps you’ve seen lots of websites that get an enormous amount of traffic every single day. The owners of these web resources become popular, they earn solid money, and they are happy with the life.
You might think a kind of “I have a great idea/service/product to spread around the globe sitting in a comfortable office” business idea. Yes, you think in a right direction. The internet is a wonderful place to start your business. However, it is not as easy as it seems.
While you could be a skillful businessman outside the internet, it doesn’t mean you can get credit in the digital world. Here you will have to face a bunch of new rules; new personal findings and, of course, barriers you will have to overcome. Here you will have to become a professional internet marketer.
Let’s presume you’ve already launched a website. You believe it will generate some traffic. Unfortunately, the only thing you can see – your website brings you zero results: you don’t have any traffic, you don’t get new customers, your brand gets no visibility and, moreover, you spend all your time in vain.
It’s a kind of disaster, isn’t it?
Let me present you 9 steps to creating a magnetic blog that will attract dozens of visitors and bring you money.
1. Know your niche and your audience
Yeah, a statement “know your niche and your audience” might sound weird for you as you’ve just entered upon the path of internet marketing but it is not as strange as you think. I am sure you know what “a chain reaction” means. Right – it is a sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place. The same happens to your online activity. You just get in touch with your target audience, introduce them your product, and, afterwards, this audience will share it via all possible social media accounts (of course, if your product worth it). Why is it a chain reaction? Because you have to do a single “stovepiping” and your service users will do the rest instead of you.
Nevertheless, I haven’t given you any idea on how to find your target audience. Well, first things first. Determine your niche. It is easy to do because you, as a businessman, already know what kind of product/service you’re going to offer. Let’s take, for example, musical instruments. You are the one who has just released a new guitar brand and, of course, you want to get customers online.
Finally, you’ve determined your niche and it is time to investigate where to find potential clients for your awesome guitars. What Google says:
As you can see, Google reveals you TOP 10 websites that sell guitars and other musical equipment. These websites are the source of your customers you could gain.
Once you’ve found the places where your target audience “dwells”, it is time to know better your competitors.
2. Know your competitors – they can teach you a lot.
Believe or not but your competitors can give you a lot of things. As I’ve showed you above – it is not too hard to find out who your competitors are via Google. BUT in this very case you should ask Google about blogs that are dedicated to music instruments:
Please pay attention to an inquiry you’re using during the search. I didn’t want to do an in-depth keyword research, I just put the first that came to my mind “music instruments blog” and Google suggested me a few solid blogs. I want to underline an adjective “solid” because I’ve checked the DR of each blog and Organic Traffic they get via Ahrefs Site Explorer:
69K of traffic – it is really impressive. And do you know what do these numbers mean? It means this blog is the place where you could find a way lot of potential clients for your own music brand.
Why do I say “competitors can teach you a lot”? Because, thanks to discovering your competitors’ blogs, you have a great opportunity to see what they offer to their target audience:
- What type of content they post?
- Do they add video tutorials to the blog or not?
- Do they pay attention to spreading the information via social media?
I don’t say that you should do all the same as your competitors do. But, please, take into account that these websites established themselves as the leaders being a part of TOP 10 Google results. Thus you can get lots of useful information spying these web resources.
3. Take care of your brand visibility
Despite the fact that your service is awesome as hell, you won’t scale up your customer database massively without the right brand visibility. Yeah, sometimes it is easier to say than to do. And the very first step you should do is to tell about yourself.
I am not familiar with psychological aspects of our society but the practice shows: if people don’t know your story, your background, they won’t be interested in the service you’re willing to sell them.
Why is it so important? Just because I believe everyone wants to trust to someone he or she already knows. No, it is not about personal relationships. It is about your “transparency” as a businessman. Here are a few suggestions you should follow branding yourself:
- Don’t be shy about sharing your life story. Tell us about yourself, as if you were talking to a friend.
- Point out how your product or service can help your users to solve their problems
- Share your story via social media accounts.
- When you talk about your service, you should never be arrogant. Remember, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar 🍯
4. Create a social media presence
I could combine this tip with the one above because a social media presence is a part of your brand visibility. However, I decided to talk about it in detail. I bet you won’t argue with me that creating accounts throughout such social media resources as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest is not a hard task. Yes, it will take some of your time but doing a good job these social media accounts will help you spread the information about your brand’s activity.
It’s a very slippery slope when marketers tend to self-promote instead of engaging more and more users to get familiar with the service itself. If you want to see that your social media efforts aren’t in vain, you should do the following:
- Refresh the information on your social media accounts daily.
- Never ignore comments people post.
- Always reply to users’ questions.
- Share the information related to your niche but don’t be persistent with self-promotion.
- Use various methods of catching users’ eye: post videos, images, infographics. Make sure your content is interesting.
- Use Twitter as a great place to find new connections and take a part in various conversations.
Use Instagram as the platform for posting innovations in terms of your service. Don’t forget to be closer to your users by posting some shots from your daily routine.
5. Be a guest contributor
Guest posting is an excellent way to get credibility for yourself as a marketer and, of course, to make your brand popular.
If you want to get visibility for your own blog, you should “fan a spark” on other blogs as the writer.
What will it give you?
Firstly, you will get credit as a writer and as a professional marketer. Moreover, you will increase traffic to your site earning backlinks.
Another one cool thing that guest posting allows you to do is create business relationships with influential people from your niche. My personal experience is a great example of this. When I started writing my first articles I had neither followers on Twitter, nor business contacts on LinkedIn. Likely, my guest contributions on marketing blogs with DR starts from 40-63 helped me get useful business connections (no more, no less):
Yeah, the situation with followers on Twitter is not impressive. Nevertheless, for me (who has recently started writing guest posts) it is a good result. Likely, my contacts on LinkedIn are far better in contrast to Twitter:
340 business contacts – not bad result for a person in this industry for only a year (I started guest posting 4 months ago though).
Guest posting has only benefits for you and your blog. The only drawback you might face is absence of time. Fortunately, you will be able to overcome this “trouble” improving your writing skills.
6. Content is king – don’t forget about it!
Do you remember this statement “Master of information, master of situation?” Any kind of information is like a weapon you can use for your own benefit. But why does every marketer on the web know a rock-solid truth “content is king?” Simply because content gives users answers to their questions.
Once I stumbled upon an interesting survey the Content Marketing Institute created. It states that 80% of businessmen prefer to get general information about some brand via reading a few articles, compared to an ad. And, 78% of consumers believe that those companies that provide high-quality content build better business relationships with them. However, 58% still think that those companies that produce video content are more trustworthy.
Truth be told, it doesn’t matter what kind of content you are going to present your audience. There are lots of blogs that win the game providing their users only with articles. There are blogs that like to mix their content up – they produce articles, videos, and even, launch podcasts.
By the way, if you want to get some new valuable insights on content marketing, you should check out what the founder of the Content Marketing Institute Joe Pulizzi says.
7. Optimize your blog
Every marketer who runs a blog optimizes it in a proper way. SEO is an integral part of internet marketing. You won’t get any traffic without an optimized website. I won’t provide you with a detailed SEO course over here (there are lots of guides in the internet) but I just want you to understand the basic aspect of it.
I could say for a lark “everything revolves around content” but I am sure it is more like an unquestionable fact rather than joke! Content is KING! Thus, never neglect of creating only high-quality and unique material.
Talking about written content, you should always focus on using right keywords that will help your content get ranked well in Google. It goes without saying that using only “text type” content makes your blog very boring. Thus, don’t forget to add images, videos, infographics, etc., on your blog. These visual additions will make your blog interesting and desirable to visit. Nevertheless, even though you will have to take care of adding an optimized description, alt tags, and, as I’ve already mentioned, related keywords. Without all these SEO “preparations” your blog will be invisible for Google first page.
Please, don’t neglect SEO!
8. Mobile accessibility is important as well
Wow, I thought this tip is self-evident just because you might be read this post using your mobile device.
Taking things more seriously, mobile optimization of a website is vitally important. Especially in the age of tech progress. Let me introduce you just a few reasons why you must have a mobile optimized website:
- User experience. Firstly, mobile users want to get the information (or to purchase a product) very fast. If your website is inconvenient for mobile users, you lose out on thousands of potential customers. Additionally, mobile optimized websites lead to positive feedbacks from users.
- Traffic. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t use a mobile phone for surfing the web. Maybe you do? Well, you got a clue that mobile users are a great source of traffic for your website.
- Bounce rate. If your web resource isn’t mobile optimized, your bounce rate is going to be very high. If you want to reduce it, a mobile optimization is a must-do.
- Brand engagement. Did you know that users who have been satisfied with your website’s mobile experience will likely return to your site on desktop afterwards? Yes, it is true. Thus, your brand engagement increases its popularity. However, just imagine if your visitors are not satisfied with a mobile version of your website, what’s next? Right, they will choose your competitors instead of you.
9. Outreach
It’s good when your content finds its recognition by itself – when people can easily stumble upon it from Google. It means you’re a genius of SEO and marketing. However, what if your content still doesn’t get as much recognition as you think it deserves?
You should present your material manually to the audience. And this very process is called outreach. The primary goal of outreach is not just promoting your content (and service as well) but building new business relationships with influential people from your niche.
I want to present you a short step-by-step plan on how to do outreach via email correctly:
- Identify your targets
- Find one’s personal email address (you can use these tools findthat.email, Voilanorbert)
- Prepare personalized email template with a “killer” subject line
- Don’t be afraid of sending a follow-up email
- Be persistent in reaching out
I want to convince you that doing outreach in a proper way (and on a regular basis) will give you the results you need – traffic, brand visibility, and personal growth as a professional marketer.
SIDENOTE: if you want to know a bit detailed on how to do blogger outreach, you should check out this marvelous guide.
Conclusion
Creating a magnetic blog is not a simple process, it takes lots of time, patience, and strength. Doing it on your own without additional knowledge might slow your efforts down. Likely, things can’t be all that bad on your side!
Following these 9 basic yet powerful steps you will be able to run a successful blog that will bring you lots of benefits.
Now, since you have already been armed with my helpful tips, it’s time to start crafting your web resource. Perhaps, I ‘ll be delightfully surprised when I’ll come across your blog in a few months reading some outstanding content.
If you have anything to add, please, feel free to share your insights in a comment section.
P.S don’t forget to share it via social media 😊