Blogging is quite a popular activity right now. Everyone’s starting a blog, hoping to raise its popularity and earn some bucks online.
However, this is not a fruitful strategy in case you’re looking to establish a real business.
Yes, a blog, if treated properly, can become a gold mine in both financial and personal matters.
So what makes a blog successful?
First off, the mindset of the person who builds it is extremely relevant. It will influence the blog’s direction big time.
So working on yourself first (knowledge, expertise, experience, etc.) is something you can do to improve your odds of developing a profitable blog.
Still, even with a good mindset, many bloggers fail to reach their objectives. The majority quit, and only a few select win.
To increase your chances of achieving what you want with your blog, we’ve prepared some effective strategies that might just make the difference between a mediocre blog and a really successful one.
Without further ado, let’s start:
1. Define What Makes Your Blog Special
In order to capture attention and therefore grow in value, your blog needs to stand out from the crowd.
You first need to understand your niche market and scout the competition. Once you understand what they’re doing and what they’re offering, it’ll be easier to find a twist.
That’s right – you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel or come up with a truly original brand promise. Instead, see what others are doing and decide if you can do better.
Your blog’s unique value proposition matters a lot, as it allows your visitors to clearly understand the benefits of interacting with your blog.
Once they understand why your blog is going to positively influence their lives, they’ll keep coming back.
Eventually, they’ll pluck up the courage to buy some products from you in order to test. If they’re satisfied, you’ve just got yourself some lifetime customers.
2. Develop a Branding Strategy
A blog is only going to be successful if its branding strategy produces the right impact.
A brand is basically the collection of perspectives, experiences, and value expectations of a customer in relation to a business entity.
Your brand makes the difference between a no-name business and a high-status one.
No matter what niche market you’re in, successfully positioning your brand should only bring positive long-term results.
Figure out your brand’s promise, develop an attractive unique value proposition and let your name be heard by thousands, if not millions, of people.
Remember: all your marketing and sales efforts will bring better outcomes if your blog is also representing a brand.
If it’s just a blog, you can expect to spend a lot of money because you need to keep bringing in newer and newer people.
Instead, you should nurture each unique visitor and turn him into a loyal brand follower.
3. Leverage Social Media Networks to Acquire New Leads
The ultimate goal of any blog is to make profits. Still, until that point, a webmaster has to go through different steps.
The first step towards turning a visitor into a lead and then into a customer is assuring a constant traffic flow towards your website pages.
Do you know what most people do when they unblock their phones or start their PCs?
They’re logging into social networks.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube…all famous social media channels that can be leveraged by any blog owner.
There’s a trick though. Many businessmen try to make direct sales through social channels. This is not wrong, yet it’s not very constructive either.
Through your social marketing, try to acquire as many contacts as possible. When you have a person in your e-mail list, the possibilities are endless.
Still, if you pay money and time to tempt people to buy, you won’t build up the same quality potential.
Those people might either buy your products/services directly or they’ll leave and never come back.
That’s a waste of potential. Therefore, use social media networks to build your e-mail list and grow the brand’s reputation and trust!
4. Create an Email Marketing Strategy
“The money is in the list,” they say. Every successful marketer “wishes” that he’d grown an e-mail list earlier. But why is email so important today?
Well, through e-mail communication, brands can individualize their communication with their prospects and acquire useful feedback.
And most importantly, discover ways in which they can improve their monetization techniques.
As I was talking in the previous subheading, without “capturing” the visitor’s information, you’ll lose a lot of money, time, and energy along the way.
Instead, you can simply build a high-converting squeeze page that incorporates a free report.
These mini e-books must target a specific audience, it should refer to a specific problem/need, and it should promise and deliver a specific solution.
For example, “22 Actionable Steps to Launch Your E-commerce Store in 2 Weeks”
5. Grow Your Website in Rankings
Even if you’re a newbie marketer or blog owner, you must have heard of SEO.
This practice basically allows you to rank your website higher and higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
In order for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more search engines to rank your website, you should index it first.
Learn and implement the most important On-Page SEO optimization steps and continue with the Off-Page SEO (backlinks, social signals, etc.).
Now – if you manage to understand how search engine optimization works, your blog will always benefit from the organic traffic that keeps flowing and flowing.
Content is one of the most important factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking the relevancy of websites.
The more impact your content has, the better your SEO performance should look like.
Moreover, pay attention to your blog’s mobile responsiveness and the speed of the blog.
6. Use Paid Advertising for Instant, Targeted Traffic
Paid advertising is the marketer’s #1 tool for driving extremely targeted traffic towards his website.
There are many types of paid advertising options nowadays, and here are just some of them:
- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat Ads
- Media buying (buy space off someone else’s blog)
- Google AdWords (ads, CPC)
- Solo Ads (acquire leads from other email lists)
- PopUps
In order to build profitable paid advertising campaigns, you should understand your audience very well.
Moreover, you need to find the most profitable places to advertise.
Facebook ads might do worse than Instagram ads (for your own business) – and that’s probably because the audience you’re trying to capture is spending more time on Instagram.
Likewise, finding scalable campaigns is a matter of trial-n-error. Don’t expect to find a 200% ROI while investing your initial budget into a campaign.
More than often you’ll lose money. But that’s okay because every penny you invest can be much more valuable if the person who arrives on your website has many chances of becoming interested in your blog.
7. Offer Amazing Content
Blogs are all about content. Yes, you can leverage a blog platform to promote your products and services very well, but you should never forget why people are visiting your blog instead of another.
The difference lies in the quality of content that each blog offers.
So if you’re looking to find valuable information on how to become a better marketer, you’ll come across 5 blogs.
I’d bet that you’ll only follow and trust the 1 or 2 blogs that have managed to convince you of their expertise by distributing valuable and qualitative content.
If the content is amazing, the products and services must also be amazing – that’s the mindset that most consumers have.
You can leverage your content in many ways, as content marketing is a very broad activity that can be twisted consistently.
Once you get the hang of it, you should remain consistent. If you promised fresh content 2 times per week, make sure that you stick to it!
Conclusion
Once you reach the status of “successful blogger”, your life will significantly change.
You’ll no longer have to work 10 hours a day, you’ll no longer have to answer the requests of an annoying boss, and you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of being your own leader.
Take our tips into consideration and not only that – you should also put them into practice!
Otherwise, even this small lecture will be rendered useless, as the information you’ve gained will soon be lost.
Remember: the primary key to any kind of success is hard and smart work.
About the Author
Sarah is a member of the mymathdone.com team, who is in charge of content creation and website maintenance. Also, she uses her in-depth knowledge of commercial legal matters, commercial off-the-shelf systems, marketing and engineering in business consulting for young entrepreneurs.
Featured image:
Image source: Author-owned
