If you want to find success in the world of blogging, you need to do a lot more than ‘just create great content' for your audience.
Having already found a lot of success in the world of content creation and blogging, today I'm going to provide you with some of the best resources, tools and social media tips to expand your reach and marketing in the process.
I've already covered many winning formulas on this blog with how to make money with a blog, but if you don't focus on the content creation and promotion aspect of your blog, these monetization methods will quickly dry up as well. Each of these methods is unique in their own way and can help boost your blog past the competition, while also increasing your traffic and revenue in the process.
Improve Outreach with Direct Emails
One of the most confusing and complicated tasks of content outreach is knowing who to contact at different websites and blogs. Most websites will have a contact form, you never know who it's actually being sent to. If you want to get the fastest and best responses, you need to go right to the top.
One tool that's making the process of content outreach a whole lot easier is Voilanorbert, which provides users with access to millions of corporate email addresses that are easily searchable through the platform.
What's even more enticing, is that you can send emails when right inside the platform and can keep track of what correspondence are going here and where. Try it out and get your first 50 email searches through the site for free, while also potentially getting some great guest blogging opportunities in the process.
Start Guest Blogging on More Sites
Too many bloggers are focusing solely on content creation and not enough on getting in front of new audiences and increasing readership. First of all, when creating content for your own site it's important to make sure you have articles of at least 1,200 words or more. It's also important that you focus more on the promotion of these articles, then going live with a new 500 word article daily. Think quality over quantity.
With this in mind, guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic back to your website while building a brand for yourself in the process. Your blog already has a bunch of visitors and readers, but think about all of the other sites out there that have readers you've never gotten exposure to. For example, you are reading this post today, but might not know about my main website or blog — now you do!
To find some of the best guest blogging opportunities, you can start looking online for a list of guest blogging sites or head over to Facebook and join any of the active guest blogging groups, the advantage to using Facebook is that you are going to have much faster response rates and will quickly know who has the best opportunities out there.
To get started, simply log into your Facebook account and search for “guest blogging” in the top search box, then sort by Groups.
Got a Mobile App? Get More Installs!
With more than 2.6 billion smartphones in the world and more people using their mobile device to access the internet and find information daily, it's time to think ‘mobile. We are now seeing more bloggers go live with mobile applications of their own to reach new audience and make their content more accessible. These applications are actually quite simple to set up, as often times they are just an application that converts your blog into a responsive format or viewable within its own application.
However, what's not so easy about this process is getting other people to find and download your application. It's one thing to advertise it on social media and through your website, but to have someone actually go to their mobile device open the app store and then download it, that's another. A unique tool that is making this process a whole lot easier is LinkTexting, which sends an application download link right to your mobile device, fuss making the find and download process 1,000 times easier.
You can see a visual concept of how to uncomplicate the mobile marketing and download process through the screenshot above.
Use Social Media and Author Bio Pages to Boost SEO
Getting your website or blog to rank in the search results is one of the most important things for every blogger to do. However, for this to happen you are going to need to have a site with some really high-quality backlinks and a solid Domain Authority to go along with it. Also, just ranking at the top of Google for your site name isn't going to do the trick. You also want to rank for your personal name, top keywords you know your audience is searching for and other relevant terms as well.
The more often you rank in the search results, the more likely someone is going to visit your site. A great way to instantly increase your search rankings and listings on the main page of Google is to focus on your social profile pages and any existing author profile or bio pages you might have online. You can see a great example of this in the screenshot above, as my LinkedIn, Affiliate Summit Speaker Profile and Udemy Instructor pages all rank on the first page of Google for my name.
Go search your name in Google right now and see what comes up on pages two and three — it won't be hard to push these profiles and pages to the main page with a few social shares and backlinks. Google loves social networks and they rank content like this extremely well.
Automate Social Media Updates
With so many social platforms on the internet today, it would be a full-time job in itself to try and manage all of your accounts yourself. While you might have your own favorite social platform, it's likely your audience is spread across many others — whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or LinkedIn.
One of the best ways to get ahead of your competitors and also take better control over your social media is to automate the process when possible. Through tools like MeetEdgar and HootSuite, it's possible to schedule in content and advanced while also bringing life back to your older blog post which may no longer get the traffic they deserve. To learn more about what's working best for users of these platforms, be sure to listen to these social media marketing tips from Laura Roeder.
The benefit of using such tools is that you continually have new traffic seeing your older content, while also allowing you to focus your time, work, and effort in other areas such as content promotion. Social media is one of the best ways to continually connect with your audience, but it's also one of the best ways to put automation in play.
How to Find the Most Blogging Success in the Months to Come
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve your content creation, marketing, and outreach efforts as a blogger. It's no longer a matter of simply creating content and hoping that people will come to your site. It's now all about putting in the time, work, and effort where others fall short. These tools and recommended methods above should help with that process.