If You’re New to Blogging-Your Content Marketing Strategy Holds the Key to Your Success

If blogging is something you’re interested in doing as an income online stream, the high value skills of digital marketing are what you’ll use to set yourself up for success. One aspect of digital marketing, and what you’ll use to create a successful blog, is your content marketing strategy. It’s actually your content marketing strategy that can make or break your blogging journey. A targeted and clear content marketing strategy is an important factor in getting your blog not only seen, but seen by the right people.

It seems like everyone’s making money online these days. There’s certainly no shortage of ways to earn an income online- there’s affiliate marketing, an e-commerce site, course creation and blogging, just to name a few! If you want to create an online income stream and want tips, strategies & freebies that can help you get started, join my newsletter!

Now first things first, understand that your content marketing strategy is just one part of your overall digital marketing strategy, but it’s important for your overall success.

How can content marketing help create a successful blog?

As a blogger, you’ll use content marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy to advertise your brand or business. It’s the content in your content marketing that sells your offer or product. Content marketing can be the difference between getting your blog post seen and having readers take advantage of any products you have within it or posting and having no one see it!

So what does that look like in practice? What does content marketing really involve? Well, just what it says-marketing content. Content is just a piece of media that either educates, inspires, provides entertainment or sells something.

Let’s imagine a fitness coaching business that’s a ‘personal brand’ (a person who promotes themselves as the head of their brand) and makes money from both advertising on their blog and selling an ebook. They need people to visit their blog for a chance to earn on advertising or to see they have an ebook available. If there are no visitors, there won’t be any sales.

So what kind of content marketing do we need to have in our digital marketing strategy to help create a successful blog? Let’s talk about the type of content we can use to promote our products and brands.

Blog Posts

The first type of content is blog posts. Yes, the more blog posts you create, the better chance you have of creating a successful blog. That means the more regularity, the better and ideally you’d want to see posts several times per week or at least weekly. This provides regular value and it incentivizes visitors to keep coming back.

These posts should be well written, full of value and take advantage of using your personal brand to make use of a narrative structure, better known as storytelling. By structuring blog posts as stories rather than factual reports, you can make them much more interesting and engaging and create more of an emotional hook. If you describe how something worked for you then your audience can imagine how it might work for them.

You need to make sure all your posts have a USP (unique selling point). That means every time you post something of value, you should offer something that can’t easily be found elsewhere online- be it a pdf or ebook and even a point of view! You don’t want to offer the exact same thing as everybody else. Finding what makes you or your offer unique goes a long way to being succesful.

Blog posts also need to have a consistent vibe and tone. In other words, people need to know what they can expect when they read a blog post from you- it’s how they get to know you and if they tend to agree with you and your point of view. It’s this, that earns you the trust to sell to them.

But your content marketing strategy is more than just blog posts.

If you need some inspiration for content for your blog, you’ll want to read The 11 Posts Every Bog Needs

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is also important for a successful blog. And again, you can ride that ‘personal brand’ by making sure that you’re sharing snippets of living the lifestyle that you’re promoting. You should be the living proof that your methods/products work, so that means posting to social media. Focus on whichever platform your ideal customer uses most! Share posts that show you working behind the scenes, or your process for getting something done.

Social media posts are a great way to show the wins and the losses. When you share your hard times or mistakes you’ve made, it not only shows you’re sharing real results, but people following you are probably also making these mistakes or running into the same problems.

Sharing how you made it through those hard times or what you learned from mistakes made is a chance to relate to and encourage your followers. They feel seen. And understood. And know they can count on you to help guide them.

Now you can also use these social media platforms to dole out bite sized information from your long form blog posts. It’s a great opportunity to educate your followers and let them know that if they’d like more in depth info that they can visit the blog post.

Don’t just use your social media to announce you wrote a new blog post, use it as a companion to your blog post. You can discuss an opposite point of view, tell a story that relates or use any comments or questions to elaborate on what you wrote in the blog post.

You can also use your social media to sell-plenty of people do, but you’ll want to keep your selling posts to only a few a month. You want to focus on giving value, creating relationships and building the like, know, trust factor that you need to establish before anyone’s buying from you.

YouTube

Additionally, you could consider having a YouTube channel. YouTube is a surprisingly effective tool for engaging with your audience and for really getting them on-board with your message. If you can create videos with good production value and media, then this will instantly demonstrate your skill and professionalism.

And if you can portray your personality in a way that’s engaging and likeable, then you can build a lot more trust when it comes time to sell your products. People who have seen you speak will feel like they know you and like they understand what you’re about and what you represent.

Diving deeper or filming a how-to tutorial, based on your blog post, is another great way to use content marketing that can help your blog be successful. Again, you can take followers questions or comments from a video to create another video answering or explaining more on a topic.

Podcasts

Podcasts are a great platform to supplement a blog and it’s never been easier to start one. If you have a unique outlook on a subject or topic or if you’ve got a wealth of information, podcasting is a great way to get your content out there to others.

You could create solo shows, deep diving into a topic and sharing your experiences. Or maybe an interview show where you’ll have a chance to pick the brain of an industry leader or someone with a controversial outlook on a topic.

Podcasting may take the most time to get some steam behind it and to grow a following but it’s a great platform for teaching and educating your following. It’s also a great place to advertise your blog, either within the episode or in the show notes.

Measuring the Success of a Content Marketing Strategy for Bloggers

What does a successful content marketing strategy look like for a blogger?

This is where you’ve got to get to know your analytics. You’ll be able to see where the traffic to a blog page is coming from and you want it to originate from your content. The FB post about how your morning routine helps you stay focused as a business owner- should be driving traffic to your blog post offering a free morning routine checklist.

If the majority of your traffic to that post is coming from an inbound link (say, your main page where you link your latest offer or another blog post from your “suggested” plugin) then your content marketing isn’t really doing its job. You may want to rethink how you’re connecting your content marketing to your actual content.

Are you using CTA’s to let your readers know what they should do next? You used to be able to just inform your readers that they could check out your “link in bio” but those days are over. Instruct your readers to “visit the blog to download an invaluable resource to help keep your mornings on track and productive!”. Using an outcome specific CTA will beat a generic “link in bio” CTA all day long.

Be sure to use the connection between the readers problem and your content being their solution and how it’ll increase their overall success and you’ll see pretty quickly just how important content marketing can be in your digital marketing strategy for creating and running a successful blog.

Until next time…

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