No matter your overall blogging aspirations, whether you just want to promote your website or online store or whether you actually want to be an authority in your field, you should always be looking to take your blog to the next level. With a host of personal and financial rewards to be reaped from doing so, why not?
In order to take your blog to the next level, you’re going to have to circumvent the fierce competition that you will face and engage your readers like never before. Here’s the lowdown on exactly what you need to do:
Invest in your blog financially
Your blogging expertise and talents will only take you so far, and so will only investing your time and effort into it. You’re going to have to bite the bullet and invest in your venture financially if you wish to take it to the next level. This is especially the case if you actually wish to make money from your blog — like with most other business ventures, upfront investment is needed if overall profit is to be made.
As blogging is yet to be taken seriously as a business venture by banks and other lenders, you may have to consider taking out a personal loan in your bid to invest in your blog. In this instance, taking the following advice is essential if you want to invest in a safe and secure manner:
- Only ever take out a personal loan from professional and proven lenders — check out https://www.crediful.com/best-unsecured-loans/ for a list of 2019’s best unsecured loans.
- Do not borrow more than you know you will be able to afford — taking your blog to the next level is not worth placing yourself into debt.
- Make sure you know exactly what is expected of you when you take out your loan — not knowing when your deadline is, for instance, could mean that you pay back the money you borrowed late and, ultimately, land yourself in serious financial trouble.
Where should your money be spent in this instance, though? A clever investment that you could make in your blog is to pay for traffic, through techniques such as Facebook ads. At the end of the day, no matter how satisfying it may be to see your blog undergo organic growth, it needs traffic if it is to stand a realistic chance of stepping up to the next level — if attracting traffic just isn’t a realistic possibility for you at the moment, then you should seriously consider paying for it. Amongst other benefits, this smart form of blog promotion will provide your site with a much needed ‘social lift,’ something that will see it appear more often in social media adds. Also, if you are somehow able to achieve major virality (the likes of which Buzzfeed, Inc. and The Huffington Post enjoy), then you may also be able to spawn extra visits whenever you earn just one.
Harness the power of email marketing
What with there being so many different ways to market your blog via the internet in this day and age, it can be easy to forget just how helpful the humble email can be in this regard. Quite simply, you should never overlook the power of email marketing, and you should seek to harness it whenever and wherever you can.
By embracing email marketing when it comes to your blog’s next advertising campaign, you will put information pertaining to it right where it needs to be — on the computer screens of your target audience members. No matter who this target audience of yours may be or what kind of demographics you are working with, they will, more than likely, check their emails at multiple intervals throughout each day. Aiming to subtly fill their inboxes with information about your blog, then, should be a no-brainer.
In this instance, the key word is definitely ‘subtly.’ You should send out gentle alerts and reminders that new content has been uploaded to your blog, for instance, rather than sending them phasing mail that directs users to your blog unwillingly. If you were to take the latter option, you would stand no hope whatsoever in being able to create an email-based fanbase that wants to check out your blog over and over again going forward. Quite simply, go down the phishing route, and all trust will be broken.
Create and upload content that engages your audience
In order to take your blog to the next level, you have to the ensure that your audience is spending a lot of your time on your site, that they are visiting a wide range of your different pages, and, most important of all, that they are not bouncing from your site the moment they access it. To ensure that you are succeeding with regards to these all-important elements, you have to be creating and uploading content that engages your audience.
To create engaging content, you should:
- Go into as much detail as you can without being long-winded in your storytelling approach (get to the point quickly, write short sentences, etc.)
- Share stories that come with a definitive personal touch
- Provide content that will prove useful to your target readers
- Vary the topics that you cover in your posts
- Remember that text isn’t everything — interactive visuals, memes, gifs, and infographics work just as well
- Employ guest bloggers to create content for you, as this will help you to keep your written content both topically and stylistically fresh
- Ensure that there are no faults in your content, which means spellchecking each written piece meticulously and making sure that the information that you convey is 100% correct.
When it comes to the task of taking your blog to the next level, the above advice is absolutely essential. From investing in your blog financially to harnessing the power of the humble email to uploading engaging content, if you wish to take the blogging world by storm, you simply must make sure that you put everything that you have come across above into practice.
By Steve Conway
Steve Conway is a content marketing professional and inbound marketing expert. Previously, Steve worked as a marketing manager for a tech software start-up. He is passionate about discovering new software that will that will advance his already well-honed digital marketing techniques.