How To Market Your Blog

Once you have pillar content in place and you have plans to release a continuous stream of such content, the next step is to attract people and show them how amazing your content is. This is when marketing is crucial and, as I said previously, blog marketing is all about building communication channels.

A communication channel is a way of flagging the attention of a person and causing them to take action, usually clicking a link and visiting your blog. There are literally limitless tactics you can implement to build communication channels, from the quick-and-easy to the complex and time-consuming.

Have you ever heard the phrase you get what you pay for?

This phrase applies very well to blog marketing. Things that are easy to do are not powerful. Things that take more time and effort, generally, are better rewarded with more traffic.

Here’s a brief example:

Tactic: Leaving comments on other blogs.

It’s well known that leaving comments on other blogs is a method of attracting people to your blog. Each comment you leave has a link back to your blog. All you need to do is spend a few seconds, write a sentence or two, and ta-da, you have your first communication channel leading people back to your blog.

That’s an easy tactic and consequently a lot of people do it. Comments are everywhere and while they are certainly an integral part of the blogging phenomenon, the effectiveness of commenting as a marketing tool is poor. They send a trickle of traffic at best.

There are more powerful ways to use comments as a communication channel. For example, spend more time on each comment you make so that you add significant value to the conversation, focus a lot of comments on a certain few key blogs and use comments to form a relationship with high profile bloggers.

These techniques can expand the communication channel from a trickle to a stream, yet it is very unlikely that commenting alone is enough to build a popular blog.

Tactic: Write a 30-page free report and release it on your blog, then email other bloggers to let them know about it.

A powerful technique is to spend a week writing a comprehensive report, release it on your blog, email several popular bloggers and ask them to check it out.

The results can vary, but if all goes well a lot of other blogs will link to your blog to recommend the report, driving a surge of new readers. If you have content pillars in place, you will convert many of the first-time visitors into regulars and bam, instant audience.

I consider this a communication channel with significant breadth and scope. It’s like a large river rather than a small stream - a more powerful blog marketing technique that will continue to drive traffic for many months, even years to come.

If you are looking for an example of this technique look no further than the report you are reading right now. Be sure to forward this report to all your friends and make a blog post recommending your readers download it too, so you can help prove my point :-)

Turn Your Blog Into A Business

I don’t have space to adequately discuss this topic, but it should be clear to you that while blogs themselves are great income earners, there is real potential to use your blog as the foundation of a business.

You can do this in many ways, but for the sake of brevity the single most important piece of advice I recommend if you want to take your blog to the next level and build a stable business, is to create an email list.

You can do this in the form of an email newsletter or e-course, collect contact details in exchange for a free report, or a video download or access to a special password-protected area of your blog. It doesn’t matter what you offer, the important thing is to build your list so you can stay in touch with the people you attract to your blog in other ways.

Once you have an email list, the opportunities to market to your subscribers are numerous. You could apply affiliate marketing and sell other people’s products, or release your own products or services. Use your email list to provide more content to strengthen relationships with your audience, and you have another communication channel and valuable business asset.

A popular blog with an email list is a great one-two punch online marketing system to generate leads and convert customers. Using just these two tools you can establish credibility, conduct market research and develop a powerful personal brand.

If you need an email autoresponder to manage your list investigate AWeber (I use them) and GetResponse.

If you really want to make blogging the focal point of your business, you can look to acquire other blogs or launch new blogs. Your strategy may be to develop a large blog network or a small cluster of similar topic blogs to enhance your online reach and exposure.

You might consider a flipping strategy using your knowledge of successful blogging to buy blogs, “renovate” them to increase traffic and income, and sell them for a nice profit.

All these strategies are ways to go beyond the single blog strategy, yet to make any of them work you must understand and be able to implement the fundamentals of successful blogging. You can take blogging as far as you want to, once you have the keys to blog profit.

If you have not built one great authority blog, I would avoid buying or starting new blogs or even starting an email newsletter if you are struggling to produce content for your current blog. It’s important to focus energy on creating one great blog first, then

My Top Blog Monetization Methods

Of the above methods, Affiliate Marketing is my top recommendation (after recursive affiliate income and direct ad sales) because if you can find a good product to sell, even if it doesn’t pay out recursively, you can make good money. Some products I have sold have made me as much as $8,000 in a week - a very good result in a short period of time.

I have also made money from Google AdSense, RSS
Advertising, Text-Link-Ads and paid reviews with
ReviewMe.com and direct for sponsors.

As I’ve stated, I look for low effort, high yield monetization methods that preferably are highly targeted to my readership. Systems like Text-Link-Ads.com and ad brokers that pay by the month are good because they are not labor-intensive. Affiliate marketing is great because you can pick products that you use and directly relate to

your audience that keep paying long after you first publish the article, thanks to traffic coming from search engines.

Contextual programs like Google AdSense, brokering services that pay by the impression, RSS feed advertising and paid reviews are not good because the amount of money you make is directly related to how many posts you produce. You may as well use these services as long as they don’t impact your other, more stable monetization, but I would not want to become too dependent on them.

You can read a detailed breakdown of my top monetization methods based on what has worked for my blog in this article – My Top 7 Blog Monetization Methods.

If you haven’t watched my video on how I make money from my blog, now would be a great time to do so to crystallize how the monetization methods above work.

Here is the link again:

Blogging Is Not Just A Hobby
Blogs are one of the most powerful online marketing tools I have ever come across.

How I Make Money Blogging (Video)