Executing a successful marketing campaign regardless of the channel can be difficult even for the most experienced marketing professionals. Bloggers are forced to focus on more than simply creating content for publishing on their blogs but also how to master content distribution and building a solid reputation and authority - this requires an investment of time, sometimes trial and error and even some cash.
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This doesn't mean that all of the time and experience, or the trials and errors, have to be yours though. Instead, you can learn from bloggers who have been successful in marketing themselves and their blogs and follow their lead while leveraging some of the most innovative tools and services in the industry.
Here are 6 vital services that successful bloggers have used to market themselves or their services:
1) A Reliable host is an absolute necessity
Let's face it; you cannot successfully market yourself, your blog, or your services if your blog experiences frequent downtime or is not capable of handling random spikes in traffic. You'llnot only risk losing your faithful followers and readers, but your reputation could be damaged beyond repair.
In addition, readers are impatient and expect content to be served practically instantaneously and if your blog's load time is poor as well; you stand a chance of losing most of your readership. Up to 40% of website visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Web hosting has evolved much in the last decade and server space has become more affordable, robust and adaptable to the economy of this age that requires quick and easy deployment and higher capacity. Innovators in the web hosting market like Hostt have made barriers to entry almost non-existent as their powerful hosting service is practically free allowing bloggers and startups launch seamlessly.
There's simply no excuse now for using an underperforming hosting provider.
2) There's value in list building
Email continues to be a top performer among marketing channels with around 4,300% return on investment reported by many marketers. Acquiring qualified email leads mean that you'll have intimate access to people who are in tune and interested in what you have to say. If you have something amazing or useful to share on your blog, readers will follow and share your content.
In addition, collecting emails and integrating them with an email marketing service like GetResponse is as easy as quickly installing a free list building plugin like Sumome's List Builder product which allows you to quickly capture email subscriptions at various points on your blog.
Email marketing performs and yields great results for marketers. Investing in a reliable service is your first step and should be employed from day one.
3) Being sociable is a must forevery blogger
Social has become as big, if not bigger, than search. In fact, Facebook is the top web traffic referrer for most news websites. SEO is still important, and we'll get to that, but social has been quickly moving up in the ranks as being a top way to market anything.
Social media has been an area that bloggers know they need to utilize, but many admit that they don't know how to best go about doing it or the time to execute.
Rather than struggling to do it yourself, bloggers can take advantage of a service like $99Social which, for only $99 per month, manages the entire social media campaign management process.
From posting updates, creating visual image based content; executing strategies and responding to followers, this service gets the practical tasks done for you that are required for growing your social reach and impact. Outsourcing social media management means that you have more time to work on your blog and other areas of your online business.
4) Keywords are vital
Targeting the right keywords to attract search engine traffic is a very important addition to every digital marketing strategy. With the massive increase in search engine competition in recent times it's important that you understand where opportunities exist and how to navigate the SEO landscape.
Mastering the use of the right keywords to formulate useful, relevant content that performs in search engines has the potential to drive massive success for any blogger.
A service like SEMRush is powerful for determining which keywords are worthwhile with the potential traffic and competition associated with them. It's a rich and deeply insightful services for formulating effective content strategies - a must for all content creators.
5) Monitor your marketing efforts
How will you know how your marketing campaign is doing if you don't monitor and analyze it? Using a service that monitors as much as possible in your campaign is so important to your knowing what is working and what isn't.
Using Google Analytics is one way of tracking your blog's traffic and seeing the results of your efforts. However, it's not going to tell you everything you need to know about your blog or online business as a whole and it's likely that you'll end up using a multitude of apps to achieve various things and make sense of all your activities.
Sometimes having a dashboard tool like Cyfe is your best bet for making sense of all the data that'll be coming your way while saving time from logging into 20 different accounts for instance.
Cyfe pulls custom data that you specify from over 60 apps to help you formulate the perspectives that you need to understand and manage your online presence and effort through email marketing, social media, SEO and other performance based data.
Final words
Although trial and error is how many bloggers determine which services they need to be successful in their marketing campaigns, it's not something you'll have to experience as put into action and use the experiences of others.
Using these 5types of services will put you ahead of the rest, even if you can only invest in a few to start with; and gives you most of what you need for growing and managing a successful presence online and blog.
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