Running your own blog is a great way to share your thoughts and opinions with others, make some cash on the side, and potentially create a business that earns you a lucrative full-time income. But what is a blog without an audience and how do you make them come in the first place? Well, this is where you’ll have to learn about marketing.
As a matter of fact, much of what you’ll be doing in the first few months of your blog’s life is generating traffic and creating an audience who are interested in reading your content. There are already hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet that are better established than yours. Some of which might also be in your niche.
But don’t let this bring you down. It’s likely that you have a unique approach or idea and you’re confident that it’ll stand out. Here’s what you should do to market your blog effectively without spending a whole lot of money if any at all.
Site Optimization
Your first step should be to get your website into peak condition and prepare it for success. Start by considering your hosting provider. If their service is unreliable or slow, it’s time to find a new one. You can then obtain a variety of plugins and make a few tweaks to further improve the speed of your website.
Be sure to go over your theme of choice – it should be unique, smooth, and mobile-friendly. Go for a premium theme if possible, as most standard WordPress options become outdated quickly. You should also index your website in order to make it findable by Google and other search engines.
Take some time to understand internal and external linking. This is important for SEO as you need to properly link internal pages to each other on your website, as well as have outbound links to high-quality, authoritative websites. To get the job done right for good, you can enlist a white hat link building service.
Content Optimization
Before you hit publish for your first article, there are a few steps you should take in order to properly optimize the content. Add meta tags to your URL, description, and title for each post. Include keywords where organically possible, such as in headings, page subheadings, and the first paragraph of your article.
You can also optimize your images by ensuring they are good quality while also being compressed in order to reduce their file size, subsequently decreasing page load times. Be sure to add an alt text to your images so that visually impaired readers can understand your content and for search engines to index your images.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn… there are more than enough social media hubs for you to take advantage of and boost your marketing efforts for your blog. Social media is a place where you can engage with your followers, promote new content and products (if you offer any), and provide valuable content to your readers,
There are certain uses for every social media website. For example, you can use Pinterest to bring in users to your blog by creating boards on your profile and pinning images from your blog post. You can use your Twitter following to drive more organic traffic to your new posts, as well as Facebook and Instagram.
Conclusion
Once you have these steps fully covered, you can take on more daring marketing adventures, such as buying advertising space or paying for sponsored posts.
The above approach is the most widely recommended, as it shows the importance of paying attention to your content and your website before buying ads. Focus on delivering quality content and presenting it based on what works best.
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