One of the most popular methods of marketing on a shoestring is blogging. Blogging is a very powerful, though long-term, marketing method that gets results. It’s important that your blog is on your website and not on an external blogging site where they own the content. You want to own all your own content.
Nine Tips to Making It Work
Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to market your business on a shoestring budget if you know what you’re doing. It may take some practice before you get good at it, and it will definitely take perseverance. But if you have that, you can get a lot of business by simply blogging your way to success.
- Blog Regularly – It’s important that you update your content on a regular basis, and at first you should shoot to fill your blog with content three to five times a week. Once you have over 300 pages, you can cut down to weekly blogs.
- Know Your Audience – Before you write a single blog post, it’s essential that you know who your audience is, what their problems are and how you can solve them. Plus, you need to know how all that ties in with your products and services.
- Understand Your Niche – Study all you can about your niche, including your competition and the industry as a whole. The more you know, the more you can share with your audience, and the more valuable of a resource you become.
- Include Keyword-Rich Titles – Going nuts with keywords is no longer necessary, but you should still use them in titles, headers, and subtitles. This will enable search engines to locate the content but it will also intrigue your audience.
- Make the Content Unique – The content on your blog and website should be 100 percent unique to you. You can check it using software like Copyscape.com or Grammarly.com.
- Share Other People’s Content – An exception to unique content is that you can share other people’s content if you do it right. Include a blurb about the content you’re sharing, and link to it where it was originally posted.
- Keep Your Comments Open – A great way to encourage user-generated content is to ask for comments and then comment back to people. You can have entire discussions right on the blog in the comments.
- Use Relevant Images – An image is worth a thousand words, as they say, so you should be using them to help explain your message to your reader.
- Use a Variety of Formats – Don’t just use one type of blog post. Try to use a lot of different formats and types of content for your blogs, such as “how to” posts, long-form posts, guides, vlogs and more.
Using these tips will help you market your business on a shoestring using blogging. Blogging regularly, in a relevant manner, will bring your audience to you. But you also need to remember to promote the things you publish. Just like you promote your YouTube videos, promote your blogs regardless of which form or type they happen to be in.