blogging (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
Table of contents- Blog marketing is “You” marketing
- Cross platform: The “What” and the “Why”
- Implementation: Using CPM with your blog
Blogging never receives the credit it truly deserves. While some analysts haphazardly say that micro-blogging sites like Twitter makes traditional blogs irrelevant, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, a Blogging.com survey indicates that there are well over 30 million bloggers in the U.S. alone. That would indicate that it’s just as lively, if not more so, than it ever was.
Blog marketing is “You” marketing
Blogging is much more than online journaling, or “opinion mongering,” it is the primary way people – authors and entrepreneurial-minded professionals – establish themselves as thought leaders. But establishing yourself as a thought leader means that people need to read your thoughts.
Since you, as a blogger, are very much a brand, you’ll need to start viewing yourself from a marketing standpoint. This means adopting the best marketing platform for your brand. While there are plenty of avenues to pursue in this regard, few offer more flexibility and power than cross-platform marketing.
Cross platform: The “What” and the “Why”
The web marketing space is saturated with buzzwords that shape the way people talk about marketing. Cross platform marketing may just seem like another buzzword you’ll need to wrap your head around, but it could be the solution to your blog marketing woes. These days, reaching the customer is impossible without the application of multiple marketing channels.
Ideally, marketers should be integrating their marketing strategy into a hub–that’s what paves the way for effective cross platform marketing. CPM flips the old-school marketing idea on its head – that all campaigns are focused on the marketer – and makes the customer (i.e. readers) the central focus.
This means you listen to and engage readers and track their reading/searching habits. This gives you the power to produce blog content and deliver to your readers in their context, not yours.
Implementation: Using CPM with your blog
- Start with the end in mind and then work backwards – Ask the hard questions about your blog. What’s your end goal? Do you want to make money? Do you want to simply gain more readers? Do you want more shares on social networks? Whatever the goal is, get real specific so you understand exactly what you’re trying to accomplish through your CPM campaign.
- Collect/Analyze data – Odds are somebody’s reading the blog. Who are they? What do they do? What do they read? Where to they search for things to read? What blogs do they frequent? Collect all of this data and write it down. Again, be as detailed and specific as possible.
- Write – Now that you know what you want to accomplish and who your readers are, write. Publish content on the channels where they digitally live. This means actively engaging readers in their digital neighborhood.
The cold hard truth about cross platform marketing is that it isn’t all that easy. It does take a lot of legwork. In fact, it would probably be easier to simply blast marketing messages across a bunch of different platform simultaneously. The only problem is that would be infinitely less effective than learning about users, and engaging them in a meaningful way through the digital channels they care about. This is at the core of CPM, and will be better off for your brand in the long-term.