By- Sunidhi Beeliya

Blogging has lately become a popular tool for building a positive online influence through legible content. As many young graduates are plunging on the startup bandwagon, it's evident that becoming an entrepreneur excites them more than choosing to work for someone else. The enormous inspiring stories of various multi-million businesses that started off as a blog initially, add up to their ambitions. Blogging helps drive traffic, promotes your content and offerings, and helps to instill trust among your target audience. Moreover, blogging is one of the most economical and effective ways to start sharing your ideas with people. Although good content writing skills are essential for starting your own blog, knowledge of marketing your content to the right audience is what helps you turn it into a business. So, if you are a budding blogger and are willing to increase your reach, here are a few marketing tips that would not let your blogging efforts go in vain!

1.Search and target keywords – Readers majorly consume content through search engines. Targeting top keywords and formulating your content around the same is essential for your blog to be seen, consumed, and shared. Set your content goals and expectations, understand different types of keywords, your audience's taste, your competitors' habits, things to avoid, and create a keyword research strategy. Regardless of the industry and niche that your blog is focused on, you must know about different keyword research tools and techniques, competitor keywords, keyword gaps, long-tail keywords, buyer keywords, related keywords, and low competition keywords. Strategic keyword research helps attract the interested audience, increases conversion, gives you an insight into market trends, helps in prioritising time and resources, and helps your blog to rank better.

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2.Leverage social media platforms – Unless you own a full-fledged website, opting for paid marketing alternatives might feel heavy on your pockets. Thus, social media is a vivid, free-of-cost, powerful, and highly engaging choice to reach out to your audience. To leverage the power of social media, it is imperative to not only share your blog on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms, but to also create and optimise socially shareable content. Link your blog with social media posts and use relevant, intriguing, unique captions, and visually appealing images. You can use free tools to create infographics, GIFs, illustrations, and graphics. Integrate social media buttons on your blog, automate content sharing on social media, produce and share blog posts consistently, set an optimal time for posting based on your audiences' activity, and use relevant hashtags to ensure maximum reach.

Blogging helps with marketing with audience Photo by Fikret Tozak on Unsplash

3.Network with experts in your niche – Building meaningful relationships with experts in your niche gives you an opportunity to learn from more experienced and skilled content creators. Use your networking skills as a blog marketing tool by searching and connecting with influencers in your niche, mentioning industry experts in your blog posts, inviting people to write on your blog, hosting thought leaders in your niche through webinars or podcasts, and co-hosting with renowned brands in your industry. Building fruitful relationships will gradually help you to get mentions, tags, redirected audiences from other platforms, valuable insights and facts about your niche, business advice from experts, and would ultimately build the credibility of your content. You will be able to connect with a larger audience and have a good share of voice in the highly competitive market.

Also read: Essential Marketing Tactics For Any Start-Up

A pro tip: Learn professional marketing strategies through specialisation courses

For your blog marketing tactics to be on spot, honing in-demand marketing skills is important. While good communication, content writing, creativity, language, and editing skills are prerequisites for starting a blog and could be developed over time through constant practise, learning blog marketing skills on your own could be a hard nut to crack. Online specialisations are specifically designed to help beginners start their careers in the field of their choice. You can opt for a digital marketing specialisation which will not only boost your blogging and marketing skills but will also help you become an expert in content, email, and social media marketing. You can learn to create your own blog, publish posts, and use Google Analytics to track your blog performance. Concepts like SEO, Google Ads, ORM, social listening, marketing automation, strategic planning, and growth hacking, are also covered in the specialisations. Add on perks include continuous practice and assessment sessions, industry recognised certificates, and 1:1 Career Planning Sessions with industry experts that help you build professional knowledge and have a credible presence in the market.

Courtesy: Internshala Trainings (training.internshala.com) – e-learning platform to learn new-age skills from Internshala

Keywords: Blogging, Content writing, Networking, Social Media, Marketing