Blogs are one of the best platforms for traffic generation IF you are able to come up with ongoing, compelling, irrisistable content because…
- Blogs allow for simple writing, formatting and posting…you can focus on the content
- Blogs syndicate via RSS, so you get the benefit of having your blog (WordPress, Google or Tumblr) automatically “pinging” your content to various directories and locations just by hitting the “Post” button
- Plugins makes blogging platforms especially powerful as you can quickly load modules that can help you with everything from spam and backup to SEO and incorporating an email signup form or advertising…sky is the limit here
- Participation…the thing I love the most about our blogs is that your community get to participate leading to more, ongoing content AND driving the interest and passion of your marketplace
Anyone who has planned or done any serious blogging knows though that although blogging can be simple and fun, it does take dedication and some time to regularly post great content.
What do you post about?
Here is a system we go into detailed training on inside InfoMarketer’sZone that we use daily to drive traffic to our blogs and drive sales based on content.
1. Know Your Target Market
You cannot properly and efficiently plan a blog marketing strategy without knowing your market, the niche you will focus on and ideally (though this can come later) how you will add value and monetize within your niche. You will be less successful launching a blog about health, more successful blogging about weight loss (or a specific sub-niche within health) and even more successful if you drive that down one level to things like “natural weight loss”, “fat burning”, “diet and exercise”, etc… The more tailored you can make your blog to solving specific problems or fulfilling specific desires, the more successful your blog will be
2. Have A Sales Funnel
Blogging is great, but unless you expect your blog to be a hobby, the idea is to make money with your blog. You do that most effectively by having one or more sales funnels that typically pulls people coming into a specific post on your blog, through a special offer (giveaway, report, video, free teleseminar, etc…) toward a landing page (sometimes called a squeeze page) which pulls them onto your list and into your email marketing campaign followed by sales conversions. Blogging without a sales funnel is fine for a few weeks (as you experiment and find your way) ideally you want to get that sales funnel up fast though so you aren’t “leaking” traffic.
3.Finding Ideas To Blog About
You can’t just randomly blog about anything you want and hope to efficiently pull traffic that converts, you need a content plan.
Try this…
a) Find blog directories or popular discussion forums around your niche market. start by going to Technorati or Google’s Blog Search and enter a few of your best keywords –
b) Use a browser plugin like SEOQuake (which installs a toolbar on Firefox that allows you to assess the pagerank, traffic, and overall popularity of each website you land on) to help you find those blogs and blog posts that are established and get decent traffic
c) Do the same thing by searching Google for “YOUR KEYWORD Discussion Forum) and find those discussion forums that have active posting today (so you know they are busy and popular)
d) Take a look at these blogs and discussion forums, you will begin to get content and topic ideas instantly, but what you really want to focus on are those blog posts or discussion forum posts that get the most visits and participation. This helps give you the particularly hot content ideas.
e) Do the same thing with the hottest books around your keyword (use Amazon) and the hottest magazines around your keywords (use your local bookstore or a site like Magazines.com)- again you want to use these established sites to get content ideas. With Amazon, you can use book titles, tables of contents and user comments to give you blog post ideas while magazines you can use the articles themselves.
f) Now what you want to do is take your cue from all of these ideas and develop a killer blog post title that incorporates the problem and solution that you found from your research above, you want to post that under a category on your blog that most closely matches the keyword associated with the post AND you want to tag your post with 3-4 keyword rich tags.
g) As part of your blog post make sure you do 3 critical things…
- You share the challenge or desire you know your reader wants addressed
- You give them useful but incomplete solutions – with a link in the text of the blog post back to the complete solution (your landing page giveaway, an affiliate website, your own website, etc…)Â The idea is to bring them from your killer content to your sales funnel
- Include an invitation to give their point of view, answer a question, debate your point of view, give their experiences, etc… which will get you comments and ongoing content generation which will help keep that content fresh and indexed in Google
h) Next, you want to bookmark and include links back to your blog post from social networks, forums, article resource boxes, etc…you get huge power out of cross-linking content around different networks. For example, I immediately post to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc… when my blog post has been published. I will also change my signature in certain niche forums to link back to that post if it is particularly relevant to a given forum. I will often write a related article and link back to the post from my article as well so that if the article is syndicated, I get many links back into the blog that also work into my sales funnel
i) As you post more content on your blogs, you can link back to older RELEVANT content to help ease of use across your site and keep content maximum exposed.
YOUR COMMENTS?
These tips should get you massive results, we have further training on advanced marketing techniques like this inside Infomarketer’sZone…leave us your comment and let us know if you have used these techniques or perhaps you have another way of coming up with blog posts you would like to share?
