Did you know that every day over a million blogs are left idle and never updated…again?

Now I just made up that statistic but I can assure you that many people enter the blogging world thinking it’s going to be easy to get traffic, get buyers and make millions of dollars.

They think they just have to write blog posts and the money will come flooding in.

WRONG

Your blog is a product and there’s no product that’s ever been created that sells itself.

Without marketing there would be warehouses full of unknown things and your blog is the same.

If the world doesn’t know about your blog then it’s going to be one of the millions of cold and lonely blogs lost in cyberspace…never to be updated again!

There are certain steps you have to take to market your blog but first…

The Basic Reasons People Buy

There are only three basic reasons why people purchase goods and services:

  • Because they need them
  • Because the product solves a problem
  • Because it makes them feel better

Understanding this helps enormously when marketing.

Depending on the ultimate reason for creating your blog (which is more often than not to earn money) then you can use this information to write more focused articles, blog, forum and social media comments. Appeal to all three types of people and you’ll have part of the perfect marketing formula.

Who Are You Targeting?

Whether you’re marketing a physical product or a blog, you need to get it in front of the people who need it – your target market for your chosen niche.

Ask yourself a simple question “who is my ideal blog visitor?” and start building a picture / persona of them. The ideal customer picture will help you decide who to market to.

Networking With Your Target Market

Whatever the subject of your blog or the product you’re promoting there are places where your target market hangs out.

  • Blogs
  • Forums
  • Social media

Three good places to start looking, participate regularly by leaving helpful and informative comments and people will follow your link. Just make sure that you’re allowed to leave links on the blogs and forums you choose.

Using Twitter

People laughed at Twitter when it first emerged; even the experts thought it would fail. Today millions of people use Twitter to communicate with each other and there’s a huge market of Twitter followers that will be attracted to you. Interact, Tweet and be re-Tweeted.

If you’re thinking about marketing to Twitter users there’s a great tool you can use for finding exactly your right target market and it’s called FollowerWonk.
FollowerWonk is a way of quickly finding your target audience on Twitter – it searches users’ bios. You have a number of parameters to fill in before you start your search; the results are then delivered in a concise list.

Using Facebook

Build a separate business Page on Facebook for your business as this allows you unlimited followers. Posting regularly on social media sites is as important as posting regularly on your blog; your aim is to keep your audience engaged.

Facebook Groups is also a good place to look for your target audience and if there isn’t a relevant Group set up for your particular niche, you can set one up yourself.

Why Should I Buy From You?

People tend to buy online from people they trust, and that does include such behemoths as Amazon and eBay. Look at the way that they encourage feedback from users. They don’t edit out the bad comments, which adds to the trust factor.

You need to be trusted. Very few will buy from you until they trust you.

A few things you can add to your blog that helps build trust:

  • Make it easy for people to make contact with you by adding a contact page.
  • Add a free ‘live chat’ service like Zopim where visitors can make contact with you ‘real time’. (Last week I spent 2 hours helping and answering questions to a visitor via Zopim. They ending up spending $1000 on my ‘how to make a blog services)
  • Reply to comments
  • Create a Gravatar for when you comment on other peoples’ blogs. Your image will soon be popping up all over the place – humans always respond to and recognize faces. Oh and use your real photo – not one of these cartoon type images. Who’s going to hand over their money to a cartoon looking person?
  • Offer to do things for free.  I’m a member of a few ‘personal’ groups and we help each other. I recently offered one group to build and link-up their Google Plus business page.

Then of course, there is your content. Your content builds trust. Provide the absolute best content you can – do not hold back.

What’s Your Opinion?

Many (well a few) people have said to me that I’m giving too much away in this ‘How to build a blog’ series.

“If I provide all this information for free – why would people buy my services?”

Well I totally disagree.

Of course, some will take the information and build their blog themselves. Great!

But many, many others won’t.

They may be afraid to start in case they mess things up.

They may be concerned or not understand all the jargon or technical aspects.

They simply may not have enough time and would rather concentrate on what they are good at and outsource the blog building to me.

Since starting this ‘how to make a blog’ series…it has increased my traffic and I’ve had more requests for my blogging services.

Give your best knowledge away via your content and make sure you use my free (no-optin) guide: 12 Steps To Boost The SEO Of Your Blog Posts

Email Marketing

Keeping in touch with your subscribers should be a major part of your marketing and can easily be done via an e-mail marketing campaign.

In future posts in this ‘how to make a blog’ series we will be explaining how to set up an autoresponder service to deliver e-mails to your subscribers and how to set up an effective squeeze page to capture those e-mail addresses.

But for now…remember people don’t tend to buy the first time. It takes trust. (Have I already said that?)

An e-mail marketing campaign is an effective way to remind them of your blog and to keep them coming back. Mention the products you’re promoting occasionally – not in every e-mail, and eventually many people will come back and purchase from you.

Mobile Marketing

Within the next couple of years one billion people will have already accessed the internet using a mobile device and many are rapidly turning to these devices instead of laptops or desktop PCs.

You can download a free mobile marketing kit from http://www.hubspot.com/mobile-marketing-kit.  There are a lot of technical aspects and special techniques involved in mobile marketing that would take pages of explaining.

Suffice  to say don’t ignore this massive market – it’s only going to grow exponentially. Learn as much about it as you can now especially if your blog is for promoting specific products.

In Summary…

  1. Understand WHY people buy
  2. Build a persona of your ideal customer
  3. Hang out where your ideal customers hang out
  4. Build trust
  5. Start an email marketing strategy (you may want to wait until the next post in this series)
  6. Make your blog mobile friendly

In the next post on the series, “How to make a Blog” we shall cover the topic of “building your list

The previous blog posts in the ‘how to make a blog’ series:

Part One: How To Make A Blog: Getting Your Niche Right Is Crucial

 

Part Two: How To Make A Blog: Finding The Best Keywords For Your Chosen Niche

 

Part Three: How To Make A Blog: Monetizing with Affiliate Products

 

Part Four: How To Make A Blog: Monetizing with Digital Products

 

Part Five: How To Make A Blog: Choosing a Domain Name and Hosting

 

Part Six: How To Make A Blog: The Tools I Use To Make A Full-Time Income

 

Part Seven: How To Make A Blog: Are you Content with Your Written Content?

 

Part Eight: How To Make A Blog: Perfect Your SEO Habits

 

Part Eightb: How To Make A Blog: 12 Steps To Boost The SEO Of Your Blog Posts

 

Part Nine: How To Make A  Blog: How To Get Hundreds Of Backlinks Every Day