If you’re leveraging a blog to build your home business, then the wisest thing you can do is to come up with blogging strategies.
If you’re not using any blogging strategies, then you will definitely have a hard time making progress with your home business.
But what if you don’t have a clue as to what blogging strategies to use?
There are many of you out there who have a blog, but don’t know how to make the best of it when it comes to growing your home business.
Well, I have a surprise for you!
My guest Dan Ewah of http://danewah.com have some powerful and simple-to-execute tips that will help catapult your blog.
So without further adieuHere’s Dan Ewah!
I was brainstorming earlier this month with Sherman and we wanted to do something unique for you along the lines of Blogging Strategies as we go into the last quarter of the year, so we came out with this.
I’ll be helping 2 people who drop the 80th and the 120th comment on this post to write and launch a Premium Press Release for their business for FREE (Value is $247).
You are free to drop multiple comments, but they must be unique (no repetition) – Let’s have fun guys.
This is my first guest post here and I’m sure I’ll have fun with this awesome community, I want to appreciate Sherman for giving me this opportunity to stand a chance of meeting some amazing people here through this post.
Why Blogging Strategies?
Some time ago I got talking with a popular blogger and I was shocked when he mentioned to me that he was having a hard time making money from his blog.
I was shocked because he commanded some influence, heck, many newbies even look up to him for guidance.
Then I found out he didn’t offer any product/service on his blog, just affiliate banners.
A blog in and of itself is not a business…
It would be funny if it were not stupid to rent an offline shop and expect to make money from it, if you have not stocked it with products to sell or services to offer.
Same applies to your blog, its purpose is to help you establish thought-leadership and attract the customers/clients, so what happens when they are attracted and there’s nothing to buy?
Note: In case, you are in the place where you don’t have any product to offer on your blog, then I recommend you take this Product Creation Training by my friend Alex Jefferys.
Now that you know without the shadow of a doubt that you need to offer a product/service on your blog, we can safely go ahead to look at the 6 Blogging Strategies that will always get you ahead.
Hear this…
The foundation of successful Blogging Strategies is Consistency.
To make a success out of your Blogging Strategies, they must be Simple andYou must be Consistent and Persistent.
There are lots of Blogging Strategies, but I’ve distilled it down to these 6 that are a must and fail-proof.
1. Purpose
Ask yourself, why does your blog exist? – Purpose
Where are you going with your blog? – Vision
How will you get there? – Mission
If you answer these questions, then you’d be positioned to write with more clarity.
2. Buyer Personas (Define Your Target Audience)
Don’t waste your time, it’s simply impossible to cater for everybody.
In fact, even in the Blogging Niche, you can still specialize.
I wrote this guest post on Sherman’s blog and even throwing in $500 in bonuses to his audience because I believe that his audience is my target audience.
Ensure that your Guest Posting, Blog Commenting & Interview efforts are only done on blogs who have got your target audience.
Adrienne Smith wrote a perfect post that teaches how to write for your target audience.
Here are a few examples of buyer personas;
Age
Club memberships
Education
Geographic area
Hobbies
Income level
Marital status
Occupation
Religion
Sex
Sexual orientation
Special interests
3. Keyword Research
I never write a post without doing Keyword Research, at the very minimum, I want to know if people are searching/interested in the topic I want to write about and how easy/difficult it is to rank for the Keyword.
If you are using your blog to build Influence and position yourself in your market, then it’s absolutely important to make a long list of Keywords to target and consistently write useful posts along those lines.
Keyword research is very important because Search Traffic presents the most targeted and profitable type of traffic you’d ever find online, it then makes sense to position your contents to be found by the Search Engines.
4. Write Extremely Useful Posts
Useful is relative, this means that you must concentrate on your Buyer Personas while crafting your posts; a useful post to one persona may be wildly useless to another persona.
What does useful even mean?
It means to focus on solving at least one problem that your audience is having.
Let your post be actionable.
Every other strategy will very much rely on this one to be successful, if your posts are worthless, nothing you do will work even if your elder brother owns Google and Facebook.
Try to be creative in helping your community.
Use different media in communicating the solution to them. You can do a mix of Videos, Infographics, Slides, audios, Interviews, Contests etc.
5. Distribution Platforms
You would need lots of leverage to build a successful Online Business through Blogging, this means you need to be an active member of a couple of Blog Promotion Networks/Communities.
As you share the works of others, you’d be noticed and shared too, this will help you to reach new audiences you would never have been able to reach.
I’m yet to see any blogger who made it alone; I dare say it’s improbable, near impossible to make it alone as a blogger, so quit trying to go it alone and forge useful connections you can leverage on.
A few of these should interest you, get active on them and be consistent; of course, just as with other things, you may not see success overnight but with a bit of consistency, you’ll see a surge in referral traffic.
6. Blog Promotion
It’s unbelievable that some bloggers in this time and age still publish a post and wait for traffic to come, it simply doesn’t happen.
Others will haphazardly share the post on their Social Networks and think that is Blog Promotion.
You have spent some time writing that amazing post, why not invest some time in promoting it?
Derek Halpern of Social Triggers wrote a blog post where he proposed that bloggers should spend 20% of their time writing a post and spend 80% of their time promoting it.
4 Blog Promotion Strategies
1.Blogger Outreach
A lot have been said about building relationships with other bloggers but let me ask you, what do you do with those relationships?
Blogger Outreach is one of the most powerful ways to get some buzz on your newly published posts.
This simply means reaching out to other bloggers in your niche and informing them that you’ve got a new post, you’d also do well to tell them why you think they need to check it out (What’s in it for them?).
Most times, this is the difference between an average post and the one which went viral.
But as you may already imagine, it can be a daunting task to look for the email address and message each blogger; I semi-automate this process with NinjaOutreach.
Ensure you don’t over-do this, only send out a blogger outreach when you write an epic or extremely useful posts.
2. Email List
Ensure to send out an email broadcast when you publish a new post, your email list will normally be the first set of traffic to your new post, but you’ve got to inform them about it.
This means you should be collecting leads on your blog, it’s unthinkable not to.
3. Blog Commenting
Blog Commenting is very powerful when done right and when you do it within a community that understands the Law of Reciprocity.
One community where your Blog Commenting effort will never go wrong is the Adrienne Smith community.
The strategy is very simple…
…. comment on some comment luv enabled blogs with your latest post as your comment link, this will lead to referral traffic as well as backlinks to your new post.
Ensure you add value with your comments, this means reading the entire post and skimming through the comments of others before dropping yours.
Aside from the referral traffic and backlinks advantage of blog commenting, it’s also a very effective means of connecting with some amazing bloggers.
Here’s a good list of bloggers to connect with through blog commenting, the majority of them will reciprocate.
4. Guest Posting
This is another powerful strategy to get massive exposure for your brand and build thought-leadership.
Like I said, ensure that you only guest post on blogs in your niche and has your target audience.
Here are some search strings you can type into Google to find some relevant guest posting opportunities.
29 Search Strings for Finding Guest Posting Opportunities
Your Keyword “guest post”
Your Keyword “write for us”
Your Keyword “guest article”
Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
Your Keyword “contributing writer”
Your Keyword “want to write for”
Your Keyword “submit blog post”
Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
Your Keyword “guest column”
Your Keyword “submit content”
Your Keyword “submit your content”
Your Keyword “submit post”
Your Keyword “This post was written by”
Your Keyword “guest post courtesy of ”
Your Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
Your Keyword “suggest a post”
Your Keyword “submit an article”
Your Keyword “contributor guidelines”
Your Keyword “contributing writer”
Your Keyword “submit news”
Your Keyword “become a guest blogger”
Your Keyword “guest blogger”
Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
Your Keyword “guest poster wanted”
Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
Your Keyword “writers wanted”
Over to You
Which of these strategies have you tried?
Which have you had the most success with?
Which are you most likely to try?
Let me hear your Blogging Strategies from you in the comments, I’ll respond to you and remember the person with the 80th and 120th comment gets a Premium Press Release Distribution service completely free.
