First a big thanks to @zneeke for suggesting this idea! If you have a topic that you would like to see as a "Blog Help" post, please let me know in the comments below.
As bloggers, we often occupy every role in the publication process. This process includes writing, editing, design, and marketing. The downside to this is that there are very few people good at all of those things. Luckily, we can learn tricks over time.
I am not a marketer by trade or even education. I'm just a guy who has blogged for fifteen or so years. It's the grind of blogging that pushed me to try and learn something about marketing for the chance to gain exposure to my blog. I by no means know all there is, and anyone who is a marketer by trade, please chime in in the comments below with any tips, tricks, or things I missed.
Plug Your Work
To grow your blog you need to get over the fear of self-promotion. The majority of your visitors will come from referrals of your current readers. If no one reads your blog and you do not promote it around the internet than there is no way the word can get out.
Without self-promotion, we leave it up to the search engines to find our work and rank us. Unless we get above the fold on page one of these sites, it's as good as useless. Even then, search engines only provide about 20% of a blogs' overall traffic due to the visibility issue we just mentioned.
The remaining 80% comes from referrals on sites like Facebook and Twitter. So if you are not "pimping" out your content to friend, family, and strangers online, you are only shooting yourself in the foot. Not every post is a fit for your friends and family on Facebook, but they all are for your blogs' twitter feed.
Spend a Healthy Chunk Of Time on Marketing
As much as we would like to spend all our time writing and just let the readers flow in, this is not how blogging works. We need to set aside time for marketing and branding our content. It may seem like a lot, but half your time dedicated to blogging should be devoted to marketing.
So, if you set aside 10 hours a week for your blog, five of those need to be for marketing; but don't worry, marketing is not just self-promotion, almost anything you can do to increase your blog's exposure is marketing. Promotion includes replying to comments, sharing your new posts, and networking with other bloggers.
If setting aside half of your dedicated blogging time for marketing endeavors hinders the quality of your content, than dial it back. The first and foremost goal is to create quality content. Without producing our best work, our marketing efforts will only speed up our destruction.
Host Your Dinner Party
Relating your blog to a dinner party is a common theme. You start the conversation and chime in here and there where appropriate. Too much will come off as awkward and too little will come off as snooty. Neither of which is good for your blog and brand.
Nail Down Your Brand
It is a good idea to think about your banding before starting a blog. Think of the niche you aim to fill and think up a good name for your blog. The branding should fit your niche. If not, it would be like going to a dinner party advertised as hosted by you, but, when the guests arrive, it's actually hosted by someone else.
If you already have a blog and did not think about the name beforehand, that is ok. You will have a harder time establishing your blog name within a niche, but it is not impossible. Look at the brands like "Kelly Blue Book", that name does not show the brands niche off the bat, but, over time, they have established their work in the car niche.
Using your name, or a variation thereof, like I do has the same challenges as we just mentioned. The challenge is there is no association with that niche to your name. It will take time to brand yourself as the person who blogs about X or Y. It's a long road with self-branding, but it can allow you to blog in many niches, not just one.
Write Good Headlines
Writing great headlines is a skill every serious blogger needs to master. The headline, or title, is what shows on search engines and pops up when liking on Facebook and Twitter. It's the headline that will either draw in potential readers, or push them away.
The best headlines include an even mix of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. There are tools online that will help you measure your headlines for you to make them the best you can. We'll get into that further down the page. For now, we'll focus on the parts of a good headline.
Common
Common words include the, you, too, and the list goes on. These often are needed to link ideas together and help make your headline readable. For this post, I choose to add the common word 'you' as it was important for the idea to make sense. Every headline needs common words, but be sure not to overdo it. You want to ensure you have room for other, more important words.
Uncommon
Uncommon words include need, more, see and so on. These are very similar to common where they are often used to connect ideas and short phrases. They may even add a little weight to your headline such as the word need. Using 'need' will not only connect ideas, but it implies urgency and a sense of lack if the reader owns the item.
Emotion
These next two word sections are the bread and butter of your headlines. Emotion words stir up just that, emotion in your reader. Many people act on emotional impulses and chances are you've clicked this link because an emotion formed after reading the blog title. Emotion words include: immediately, proven, and secrets. All of which I used in the headline for this blog post.
Power
Power words drive home an idea and work to get your skimmers to become clickers. These include words like gigantic, unusual, and discount. You want these words to be unique and trigger the reader to click on your blog post. Power words will drive traffic to your blog post from both social media and search engines.
Proven Headline Secrets Word Mixture
You want to mix these four types of words well within your title. The formula is as follows, 30% of your post title should be common words. Do not go over this or your headline will fall flat and lack proper emotion. Uncommon words should be 20% of your title.
Followed by about 10% of your words being emotion. Don't use too many emotion words. If you do there is a risk of sounding too much like a sales-person or your headline could appear as "click-bait." Finally, have at least one power word in your headline.
You will find as you build out headlines there is overlap between power words and emotion words. As I walk you through the steps of writing great headlines in the next section, you may find this common.
A great tool to measure your headline's potential effectiveness is CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer. It takes every part of the headline, displays what percent of each word you have, the type, and gives you an overall score. Anything above 75% is suitable for most blog posts.
Thanks For Reading!
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