15 Sep Is content enough or do you have to sell it?
By Beth Graddon-Hodgson
Last week’s post was all about techniques for pushing your blog articles on social media. This week, we’ll keep going on a similar direction and talk about how hard you should have to work to market your blog. It’s a question I’m asked all the time – people hire me for the writing but don’t have a budget for social media, guest posts, sourcing etc. However, they also aren’t interested in trying these things themselves, believing that the blog content will do all of the work.
If you’re only going to invest your money and time in one marketing arena and you’ve got a lower budget, a blog is your best step. However, it is part of a bigger puzzle – you can’t always expect to have 10,000 hits per month if you just focus on great blog content. When determining your priorities for marketing time, consider the following:
- Align your expectations of success – you may not get to 10,000 hits per month right away but I find a good, strong start for a newer business with a minimal following is about 500 per month just with a blog. That’s 500 new people to learn about you monthly.
- Remember it is about more that hits – don’t just watch your traffic, analyze how it is benefiting your SEO. You may find your rankings have improved with minimal effort.
- Keep in mind you can autofeed to social media – I can honestly say this is not my favorite, but an occasional, tasteful autofed post to social media is better than nothing. Argue all you like but I believe that!
- Consider the possibilities – you may find that some of the other things that can help you market your blog to success will take less time (or money) than you’d expect. Accept that your blog is a piece of a puzzle – albeit a big one – and do your research!