The digital era has brought about many opportunities that were once unheard of. Jobs have opened up and been created, more people have access to higher education and technical classes. It is easier to stay in touch with loved ones and easier to quickly find information. One area that has been opened up by the digital age is the invention of blogging. The world of blogging provides so many things including an outlet to express thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Many reviewers utilize blogging to circulate their reviews.
Blogging also provides a means of making money. There are several ways to make money from a blog, you can sell items or services through the blog, you can rent out spaces on the blog site to advertisers for a fee, or you can seek out work as a paid reviewer. Blogs are also great tools for businesses and organizations as well as freelancers. Regardless of the reason why, when you run a blog, you need to treat it as a business and utilize various marketing methods.
To be a successful blogger, you have to find ways to drive traffic to your blog and the best way to do that is with digital marketing. There is always the option of hiring a professional to handle your marketing, but that is not always an option due to budget restraints. In this case, you will need a step-by-step guide to help you get started. This is exactly what you will find here, a helpful guide to one of the best digital marketing techniques for bloggers, social media marketing.
Generally, the first place to begin with digital marketing is to build an amazing website; however, if you are a blogger, you already have a website to host your blog on. Therefore, bloggers will begin differently. A bloggers best marketing friend is social media. These social platforms are where you will do the most interacting with your readers and followers. While blogs generally have a comment section in which the blogger can interact with their readers, it is simply not the same in-depth experience that social media allows.
Therefore, the first thing that a blogger needs to do is build a strong social media presence. If you do not already have pages set up on all of the major networks, now is the time to do so. Be sure to include sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Instagram. If you are up to it include Snapchat as well. For those bloggers that are interested in adding a video feature, set up an account on YouTube as well. Each account should be completely filled out with as much information as possible. Leave no stone unturned so to speak.
After setting up all of your accounts, you must start posting on each account and start making strides to acquire followers. If you blog has automatic sharing options, be sure to utilize them to their fullest extent. Most blog hosting services such as WordPress and Blogger offer automatic posting to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. Facebook has recently changed their interface and no longer allow automatic posting to personal pages.
However, on WordPress, you do still have the option to establish automatic posting to a Facebook Business Page. This is a bit strange, but at least there is a remaining choice for automatic posting on Facebook. Since the goal is to establish a social media presence for you blog, you should have a business page set up for your blog on Facebook at this point anyway. There is no way to set up automatic posting for Instagram or YouTube. As for getting followers, this will take a bit of time and work. First, start following and “liking” other peoples pages and let the social media world know that you are now present. Post regularly and share the posts on every platform that you have an account on. You will find that your list of followers will grow more quickly than others, use this to your advantage. Most people have accounts on multiple social networks and when they follow you on one, they are likely to follow you on others. Take note of the ones that are growing the fastest and post links to all of your other pages to those accounts. You will see your numbers rise on all of your accounts for a short time after sharing the links. Also, do not be afraid to invite friends, family, and basically anyone you know to follow your social media pages. A follow is a follow and if you can get five people to share your page or one of your posts, it will be seen by all of their friends. It then has the potential to be shared by some of those people where more will see it and share it. The cycle will continue like a domino effect.
Now, let’s talk about posting. There are a few things you should keep in mind. The primary goal is to use the social media pages as extra outlets to share your blog posts; however, those will not be enough to keep your social networks sufficiently active. You will need to post several other types of updates as well. This includes photos, graphics, videos, news articles, memes, GIFs. interactive posts, and request posts. Keep in mind that all posts need to have excellent grammar, punctuation, and spelling. There are many fantastic tools available for free online to help you check for these types of errors. Here is a short breakdown of the different kinds of posts. Photos should always be related in some way to your blog and should always be accompanied by a caption. The same goes for graphics, memes, GIFs, and videos. Any post that is entirely comprised of text, should always include a visual aspect as well, a graphic, meme, or GIF is generally best. You should post something interactive at least twice per week, preferably more often. These posts are to engage your audience as well as bring in new likes and follows. They generally ask questions or make requests of some sort.
If you still have questions about digital marketing, the internet has a great deal of information readily available. Simply use search terms that include the type of digital marketing you are interested in and your location. For example, if you are located in Denver and are interested in SEO you will type “Denver SEO” into your search bar to find the information that you need.