Blogs are proliferating at the astounding rate of over 100,000 per day. They reflect both the both urge to communicate and the changing face of marketing. Funding a blog can be challenging, especially when you are starting out. However, micro-financing web content promotion is possible – so micro that it could be free!
You may be blogging for the sheer joy of sharing your ideas, or to mobilize action on a favorite cause. Alternatively, you could be blogging for pay, promoting something you or someone else sells.
Commercial blog is a growing category. These days, almost any product, service, or cause should probably have an associated website and blog to let prospective customers or supporters know about it.
Such commercial blogging’s growth reflects drastic changes in marketing. Many traditional channels for promotion such as network (and even cable) television, print periodicals, and broadcast radio, are giving way to online alternatives. Even print Yellow Pages effectiveness has fallen prey to the switch away from landlines (up to 75% of some demographic groups).
These factors pose a challenge for you as a blogger. You face a challenge in alerting your target audience that your expertise exists. Your audience also needs to be able to find you from any and all devices.
This, then, is where promoting your website content (as differentiated from promoting your product, idea, service, or cause, which the blog itself accomplishes) becomes crucial. How can you promote your website content cheaply? Some tools cost quite a bit, but others, happily, require no expenditure except of your time, energy, good writing, and marketing acumen.
The most fashionable buzzword in web content promotion right now is ‘native advertising’. No less an eminence than the New York Times has announced native advertising for their online edition. A separate writing and production studio will ensure that only high quality “continuously scrolling multimedia storytelling pages“ will accompany hard news, and look like them too, while promoting the advertiser.
This disturbingly parallels science fiction’s dystopian vision of future ads irritatingly tailored to a reader’s idiosyncratic preferences. Native advertising, however, while definitely cutting edge, still seems a bit high end, and you probably don’t possess a fully equipped studio like the Grey Lady of journalism!
Now, can you accomplish something similar for little or no money? Yes, and here are several rules of thumb to keep your own website busily promoting itself.
You need to generate content that is worth reading:
If your blog promotes without cessation, it will be decidedly unappealing. The challenge is to find new ways – consistently – to discuss topics related to your website content in ways that are useful to your readers. Solve problems, illuminate unanswered questions, untangle unresolved mysteries, amuse, instruct, and point your reader in new and hopeful, helpful directions. A really useful web page, like Thomas the Tank’s ‘really useful engine’, will be a happy place to which a reader will wish to return frequently.
You need to learn what content your readers want so you can promote it better:
This involves using social media to the maximum to connect with your readers. You can talk about your blog on Facebook, LinkedIn, and let your readers talk about it too. Just be careful not to impose on your contacts. This sort of interaction with your audience is termed SMO, or Social Media Optimization.
You need to make yourself findable via SEO
The web’s spider bots need your help to find you. Use best SEO techniques to give them ample signals of your presence. Exploit all potential spots in your website to cleverly slide in keywords. Keyword choice is its own science, and it requires that you know what your readers are seeking (see above regarding reader interaction).
Opportunities to feature your keywords pop up in a variety of places. These could include:
- Title tag
- The META description tag – in the first 150 characters
- META keywords tag
- In headers and sub headers within the body of the text
- Content itself, with a density of no more than 3-5% keywords, with a ratio of one page of content for one keyword.
- Any text you have hyperlinked
- The ‘breadcrumbs’ you included to remind readers how they got to this page, e.g., writing/editing-> resumes-> prices
- Alt attributes – these describe embedded images for those readers who are using accessibility software
- Title attributes – These clarify what an HTML element in your webpage does
- File names, whether of images or other files embedded in your webpage.
In anything you do using SEO, you need to avoid imposing on your readers with too many keywords to allow for readability. The task of SEO-oriented copy-writing is not, by the way, a universal talent. There is no shame in not being able to create graceful text incorporating keywords attractively and unobtrusively. You can get help on this task from a global pool of talented writers, at shamefully low rates of pay.
The important function of promoting your web content can be micro-financed. If you can afford native advertising on other webpages – wonderful. However, cheaper options exist. You will need to invest some energy and creativity, and exploit all the available SEO and SMO tools, but the result – increasing traffic, should be worth the investment.