Note: This is a guest post written by Blake Davies
In 2017 the blogosphere indeed seems like an incredible business idea. On the one hand, it allows you to create a passive stream of income and therefore put your own finances in a much better position. Now, before we carry on, it is vital that we clarify one thing – passive doesn’t mean easy or effort-free. It means that after you manage to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, you will have the option to part-time as a blogger and gather a steady revenue for a moderate amount of work.
However, you must first find a way to get there. Here are several methods to help you determine what type of marketing is the best for your business.
1. Identify your target market
Every good marketing campaign consists of two parts. You must A) have a clear message you want to send and B) you need to find the right channel to send this message through. In order to find both of these things you first need to establish the identity of your audience. To do this, you need to start asking some basic questions.
For instance, you want to know their age, gender, background and education level, seeing as how this will help you approach them through a channel they feel more responsive towards. This is especially efficient in social media marketing due to the fact that every demographic sub-group has their own network of choice (Snapchat is predominantly teen social network, same as Pinterest is predominantly female).
2. Find a better content format
In today’s world, 8 out of 10 people don’t bother to read past the headline. This makes things that much more difficult, due to the fact that your potentially incredibly well-written content might go completely unnoticed. One of the ways to increase the odds of your content getting read in the first place is to choose an adequate format. Lists, especially top 10 lists, have a much greater probability of at least being skimmed through.
From there, you can at least get your audience to selectively read at least the part of your content that interests them the most. Who knows, getting impressed by what they read might actually convince them to read the rest of the content as well.
Aside from this, you need to keep in mind that some content formats are more mobile-friendly than others. Due to the smaller screen size and resolution, mobile users are more interested in visual formats such as infographics, videos and comics. Needless to say, mobile users are currently getting more and more represented online, although conversion rates on PC are still somewhat higher.
3. SEO
Finally, it is vital that you improve your blog’s online visibility and the best way to get there is probably through SEO (search engine optimization). This method can also be divided into two major fields: on-page and off-page optimization. Both of these areas, however, need to be attended to properly if you hope to improve your blog’s rank.
According to Websitesthatsell, many consider on-page SEO has lost its influence on rankings and the truth is it won’t propel you to the No.1 spot, however, bad on-page SEO will have a major effect and even if your Off-Page efforts are fruitful, you’ll still be cemented in the further regions of SERP.
In conclusion
As you can see, there are many different techniques that could help boost your blog’s traffic and conversion rates, thus increasing your profit by quite a bit. As for the marketing methods that you would have to employ in order to get there, this is quite situational. Nonetheless, focusing on any of the three above-listed issues is bound to set you on the right path.