These days social networks are dominating the internet. As a blogger, one effective way to market and grow your blog in it’s early days is through social media marketing. While you are working on your SEO, you should also develop a social media marketing strategy to promote your blog.
Social media or social networking websites are online networks designed to create a community online. People with similar interests can meet each other and connect. If you enjoy connecting and meeting with new people, you may find that you have a knack for being an effective social media marketer. You can turn these social media marketing strategy skills into promoting your new blog.
When you first start a blog, one of your goals in mind may be to build up traffic. Perhaps you have a plan to monetize your blog some day. All of this will come in time with your online promotion efforts. However, one good way to boost awareness about your blog is through word of mouth via a social media website or through a social network. This is the online equivalent of spreading your message through word of mouth, and it can be a powerful way to garner interest in your blog.
When it comes to promoting blogs, it’s common for many bloggers to focus on SEO or search engine optimization. You can easily find a thousand articles on effective SEO techniques with a simple google search. You can implement many of those techniques, such as backlinking and keyword stuffing, and let the search engines do their job. While this works well, there are a couple of downsides to relying solely on SEO.
First off, SEO can take time for your techniques to come to fruition. That means that you need to wait for your site to get indexed and give your backlinks time to age. This can be anywhere from a few months to about a year. Much of this depends on how aggressive you are with your SEO technique. However, there is a second downside if you become overly aggressive with your SEO. As google recently demonstrated, a search engine can simply change their algorithm and your page rank could decrease as a result. So, even if you find yourself ranking fairly high, depending on the methods you used to get there, you could lose that ranking very quickly.
However, social media marketing is not subject to the same kind of limitation. Although a social media site may wax and wane with its popularity, a good social media marketing strategy would mean that you are active in several social media venues. Also, the people you network with on those sites are also members of other communities. If you are able to connect with the individuals and get them interested in your blog, they may be sharing it with their network and so on. This has the potential of growing in a viral manner and your topics may become popular very quickly.
There are some common ways to promote your blog effectively on a social media website. You don’t want to become a consummate salesman as that will turn people off. A good subtle first option is to post a link to your blog in your profile page. This way community members have the option of viewing your blog without feeling pressured. You can then include social sharing links on your blog itself, so if anyone finds something interesting it is easy for them to share it with their community.
A more aggressive approach is to inform your online network more directly. Either through public postings or sending your friends a private message. While this can be more effective in simply providing a profile link, it is also more aggressive and you may turn people off. One thing to do is that you may want to nurture your relationships for some time before you suggest your blog through a private message.
These days, virtually everyone is a member of a social network of some kind. Facebook, twitter, pinterest, linkedIn are all becoming household names. It is definitely a new frontier for bloggers to promote their blog. As you nurture and grow your social network, you are also building a powerful blog promoting machine. Think on the different ways that you can use your social network to promote your blog.
