5 essential tips for marketing your blog
1. Be Honest and Be Transparent.
Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not when marketing your blog or follow A+ bloggers in your industry for the sake of following them. The key is to differentiate yourself from the noise with compelling content. Give a reason for people to follow your blog via RSS, twitter and facebook. What makes your blog so different than the other 5000 blogs in your vertical? If you can address that question then you may become an A+ blogger yourself.
2. Be on target.
You owe it to your readership to be on target with your content. Granted I’m a bit of a hypocrite because StartupAddict has the luxury of being industry agnostic (due to being addicted), luckily most readers understand that. Use Google Analytics to hone in on keywords your audience uses to get to your blog and build on that foundation. This may sound trivial, but there is nothing more powerful in SEO than finding the power of long tail effective keywords. However, be careful not to keyword stuff or over use a term especially at the expense of your brand.
3. Optimize your blog for Search Engines
Google keyword tool or wordtracker provide insights into high volume search terms with low relative competition for that keyword term. Optimize your blog posts accordingly, but not at the expense of human readability. The simple SEO 101 tactic is to ensure you H1 or title tag is consistent with your keyword term and the alt/anchor tags.
4. Quality Link Building –
Everyone knows that link building can significantly boost SEO efforts. Be sure to focus on quality link building from relevant sources rather than quantity. Posting to 300 non relevant or spam directories will not get you very far compared to one quality inbound site with a Page rank of 4 or 5.
5. Post as a guest blogger
Find the best blogs you can within your niche and submit guest posts to them. For instance, StartupAddict.com is a “B” rated blog for entrepreneurship, startups, technology and Venture Capital news. If you have a blog about small or home business ideas this would be a great venue. You may not make it on entrepreneur.com but you need to put yourself out there. If you get use to rejection, you will have more links than you can handle back to your site. Make sure your content is interesting and sticky enough that a user will bookmark it or spread via social media.
