3 Essential Marketing Strategies for Bloggers In 2016
It’s no secret that you want to drive more traffic to your website. In fact, there is a good chance that’s why exactly you started to blog. I mean, the more often you blog, the more opportunity you have to drive traffic and leads, right?
Unfortunately, creating a blog post these days is simply not enough.
Did you know that there are more than 53 million new blog posts every month? That’s over 1,500 new posts being published every minute, more than 16 every single second. And those numbers are just from those using WordPress.
What can you do to ensure you keep your loyal visitors coming back for more?
In this post we are going to cover three key marketing strategies you can implement to help drive more traffic to your blog.
1. Web Push Notifications
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 7 years, chances are you are familiar with the term “push notifications”. Push notifications are those little messages you get on your phone telling you “your troops are ready for battle” in Clash of Clans or that “Johnny has posted on your wall” on Facebook.
Well, this push notification technology has finally come to the web and that’s a really, really big deal.
What makes this a big deal?
Well, with web push notifications website visitors are now able to “subscribe” to your website without the need of providing any contact information. No more forms. No need to ask for personal information such as email address or phone numbers. User’s can subscribe to your website by simply clicking an “Allow” button.
After a visitor has opted into your website you are able to send them short, bite-sized pieces of information at any point. These notifications can help inform users about new blogs posts, news updates or even product promotions.
What’s especially neat is that these notifications are delivered in real time to users on their mobile devices or desktop computers and are delivered regardless if they have their web browser open!
Normally implementing these “web push notifications” can be tricky but thanks to several companies, such as Aimtell, you can now implement notifications on your website in a matter of minutes.
Recommended vendor: Aimtell.com
2. Email Marketing Automation
According to statspedia.com, about 40% of all bloggers use email marketing to help drive users back to their website. However, only a fraction of these users leverage automated email marketing.
What is email marketing automation?
Email marketing automation is the software and process that enables users to nurture potential customers with personalized, useful content in an automated fashion.
For instance, imagine you have a newsletter subscription form on your website. For those not leveraging any sort of automation, they might simply capture the email and send an email when their new post is issued.
However, if you were leveraging automation you could send your email subscribers an email about your latest blog post and if they don’t open up the email, wait 2 days and send it again.
You could then even go a step further and tag all users who originally opened up the email and clicked your link (showing interest) and send them send them a PDF going into more detail about the initial email’s topic. If the user downloads your PDF, you could tell the system to wait 2 days and send them an email informing them about a product special on your site.
While that was a very, very quick example – the overarching concept is there.
All in all, email marketing enables you to put users in an automated funnel that can help provide interested users with more content, without bothering those who may care slightly less. And thanks to the guys over at customer.io – setting up automated marketing campaigns becomes a walk in the park.
Recommended vendor: customer.io
3. Advanced Social Sharing
In this day in age, social sharing is a no brainer. So it was no surprise when we saw in the chart earlier that over 90% of bloggers share their content to social media.
However, many bloggers still fall short in maximizing the power of social media. Many simply add the social sharing icons on the top of their website and leave it at that. While these are a must-have, there are more ways to help spur on sharing on your site.
One of these additional methods is known as the “click to tweet” feature.
For instance, consider clicking this link: http://ctt.ec/9xfbE. If you do, you’ll notice it will open up your twitter with the prepopulated message I’ve created.
What’s even neater is when you combine this with a quote or statistic within your actual blog post and add some styling. Here’s an example:
Thanks to the team over at clicktotweet — creating these links becomes ridiculously easy. Simply enter your twitter message and they will generate short url with tracking capabilities for you.
Tip: Also consider using these in some emails. It’s a great way to ask friends, employees or subscribers to show their support.
Recommend vendor: clicktotweet.com
Wrapping up
I hope this list was helpful in opening your eyes to some new marketing techniques to help promote your blog or website. Remember, marketing is always evolving, so don’t be afraid to test new strategies!
This is a guest contribution by DJ Swanepoel, the CEO & Founder of Aimtell – a digital marketing platform that helps users re-engage their website visitors through targeted web push notifications. Supported on Chrome, Safari & Firefox.
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