If you are reading this article, you probably have a WordPress blog. But at that stage, your blog is everything you have. We mean nobody knows about you, though, the design of your resource is worth seeing. No worries, at the end of this article you will have at least a basic understanding of how to brand your blog.
So what is branding? Here is the definition by Entrepreneur.
“Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors’. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.”
A good logo is the foundation of your brand, so be picky about it. Please view How To Make Sure You Design And Deliver A Great Logo, this will simplify the process of logo creation for you. 105 Cool Animated Logos will inspire you even more.
Overall blog design should appeal and perfectly convey your message as well.
Ok, now when you have an awesome logo and design, it’s high time to show them to the targeted audience. We will supply you with 7 tested marketing strategies of blog promotion.
#1. Facebook ads are efficient
Even if your marketing budget is tight, think twice on this tip. When you don’t want to pay with money, you have to pay with your time (we mean free resources for a promotion like Quora). What’s your hourly rate? How much time will you need to research Quora, find relevant threads, write answers (at least 10) that add value, “hide links” within them?
It will take you several hours, right? The average hourly rate on Upwork is $50 per hour. So, you will spare at least $100 on “free” promotion that gives no guarantees that your links will be clicked.
Now let’s return to Facebook Ads. You can get clicks from Facebook for under $0.30 each. Make simple calculations. $30 will turn into 100+ guaranteed clicks to our article.
The decision is up to you. Will you choose to spend your time or money? Please take into account that your precious time can be spent on something else.
We don’t want to say that you shouldn’t promote your blog on Quora. We just want to show you the price of “free promotion” and the efficiency of Facebook ads.
#2. Do you promote to the existing audience?
Do you promote to the existing audience? You won’t get far with this strategy.
With Facebook Ads, you can create a “negative audience”, people who have already visited your website, and pay only for clicks from people who have never heard about you.
This is the way to effectively enlarge your audience and expose your content to more and more people.
#3. Your content should be shareworthy
This advice isn’t new. But the fact doesn’t decrease its significance. You need to create great content for the sake of your blog success.
What you need to do is impress your readers, show them the value of your content, spark an emotion in them, and they will talk about your blog everywhere.
Genuine fans leave the comments. But you need to consistently publish useful articles on your blog to make this happen and use the other six strategies featured in this article to promote them.
The takeaway is that creating awesome content is the most crucial content promotion strategy ever.
Though, great content doesn’t equal shareworthy. We would recommend you study some psychology behind share-worthy content. This way you will better understand how to create it.
#4. You can get traffic from Google
Supposing you have written a new article. What do you do to draw traffic to it?
At first, you send your article to your email list and share it on social media. This way you get the initial visits.
Then your fans spread the word about your article further. They share it with their friends.
Then you invest some money into Facebook ads and reach some new people.
But what happens after that? When your existing audience, as well as their friends, have already read your article, you run out of budget for Facebook ads.
This is not the end if you rank in Google. Your traffic will keep growing. The effect can be reached with the power of SEO.
Not an SEO guru? We’ll put it simply. Actually, the basic SEO comes to three simple steps:
- You need to figure out what your ideal blog readers are interested in (what are they searching for in Google).
- Write an article on that topic. But you need to make sure that your article is better than what’s already available out there.
- Then you need to get links to that article from other websites.
A lot of bloggers know their audience well enough. They even don’t have to do keyword research to figure out what to blog about. They also don’t need to do link building because their fans will be happy to link to their newly-published articles.
If you are not one of the lucky bloggers mentioned above, you’ll have to spend some time studying SEO and content marketing.
We advise to starting with this post or any other SEO guide for beginners.
#5. Use the outreach technique
If you have a brand new blog, you will probably face the following challenges.
- Your budget for Facebook ads is too small.
- You don’t have an existing audience to promote your content to.
- Earning backlinks will take time and effort.
Don’t get upset too early. Create share-worthy content.
Once you publish it, show it to people in your industry who have a large audience and who get lots of consistent search traffic to their websites.
The tactic is called “outreach” in digital marketing.
How to make your outreach successful? Ask yourself why would that person care about whatever you say before sending an email.
There are only two strong outreach “excuses”.
- You have mentioned that person (or their work) in your article. Everyone likes to be praised. However, industry influencers are praised so much that they stop to care about hundreds of mentions they get daily. Your email won’t be an exception either unless you’ve had a prior connection with them.
- The second excuse is that your article has something groundbreaking that this person doesn’t know about, but is genuinely interested in.
As you see, there’s no trick to getting top people in your field to promote you. The only thing you have to do is notable work.
#6. Being active in relevant communities is helpful
Why do online communities exist? They are created for people to run meaningful conversations about a particular topic and to help one another with relevant issues. Communities exist not for promoting your stuff.
We can give you some pieces of advice on where to look for relevant communities to join:
- Search Facebook for fan groups of the leading bloggers in your field, customer groups, or simply relevant interest groups.
- Search for relevant subreddits. There is a subreddit for whatever you’re blogging about.
- Find relevant forums. You can just search Google for “your_niche forum” and you’ll definitely find something decent.
Besides, most industries have websites where like-minded people get together. Here are some good examples:
- Product Hunt (producthunt.com)
- Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)
- Growth Hackers (growthhackers.com)
- Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com/)
- The list goes on.
We are sure that you’ll get leads from communities where you are an active member.
#7. Re-purpose your content for different platforms
By repurposing a blog post into a video and sharing it on YouTube, you’ll attract thousands of extra eyeballs, which is not bad.
By the way, even if you are not skillful in shooting videos (or doing any other things to repurpose content – chart, podcast, slideshare), do it anyway. Your audience will appreciate your efforts.
Do you know what to do after publishing a fantastic article and having tons of success with it? Promote your blog further by publishing another groundbreaking piece of content.
The point is that consistent output of great work pushes your blog to the forefront of your industry.
We’d like to finish our blog post with the great quote from Ryan Holiday: Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they’re heard about.
So, we wish best of luck with branding, promotion, and marketing your blog!
About the Author!
Amy James is an Outreach & Marketing manager at ThemeRex and a true WordPress fan. She loves writing about WordPress & WooCommerce, latest web design trends and writing reviews for the newest WordPress themes.
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