It often surprises me when bloggers claim that all you need is great content to succeed. In fact, while killer content is obviously key, in addition you need at least SOME promotion.
While some things are new in the way a blogger approaches promotion, some tactics have remained strong since the web began. Blogging does not replace older online marketing tactics. Great content does not magically get noticed by hordes of enthusiastic readers. You need to create brilliant articles and then get people to take notice of them. Once you have traffic then you need to work out what you did right, and how to get more people to visit. Again,
Here are the key techniques every blogger should learn or relearn:
SEO
I don't buy into the "SEO is everything" mentality any more than I do "content is king/build it and they will come" line of thinking. SEO does though have its place.* Select a clean XHTML valid CSS template as a starting point for your blog theme.
* Use good foundation SEO practices in additional markup (eg. H tags for subheads, order crucial content before less priority items, use alt tags, bold etc).
* Take care over keyword use in titles and anchor text
An important thing to remember is you do not just want to just cater to search engines. We need titles to be actually clicked on and people to actually want to link to your stuff. Stuffing keywords everywhere and other spammy techniques will get you no further than had you not even attempted any optimization.
Tracking
ROI. Three letters that should be the foundation of any online business but so ignored. Return on Investment is the bottom line. Are you getting out more than you put in? Where does your ROI come from? Do you even track ROI? This could be money, say advertising dollars, or your time, ie. are you getting sufficient rewards for the effort? What can you do more of (or less of) to improve your ROI?In addition to the blogging basics, such as RSS subscribers, visitors, page views, you need to know at least:
* Where best traffic is coming from
* Which keywords are being used
* What topics attract the most loyal readers
If your goal is to build an audience to sell to then you need to attract visitors who are willing to buy, while on the other hand you want people who click your ads, what do those people look like? Where do they come from? How can you attract more? Your stats will tell you.
Link generation
Links are the key to good quality direct traffic and search rankings. You get far more loyal subscribers from a fellow blog than you do any other source. It makes sense, those visitors are already involved in reading blogs and are looking for more of the same.People do often think that attracting links is automatic when you have a blog. It is true to some extent, once you have found success. If your blog doesn't already fall naturally in the technorati top 1000 though you need to do some work.
Directory submissions are not going to cut it any longer, nor are link swaps. Quantity is not going to get you on to page 1 of Google. With this in mind you need to focus efforts on generating good, clean, valuable content. This is much harder than spamming and a slower process but does pay off.
As well as good, solid, regular content, you also need to look at generating “Linkbait”. Linkbait is any content or tool that has “I need to link to this” baked right in. It describes creating something so remarkable it inherently viral. This is hard to do but massively successful when it works.
Email Lists
Not all blog readers are RSS savvy. Supplying at least the ability to sign up and receive daily Feedburner emails can almost double your potential subscriber base. On my blogs I usually see around 40-50% of subscribers use email, and my topics are often high-tech, so you can imagine how resistant readers in more mainstream niches will be to feed concepts.Also do not throw away the traditional email list either, they still work despite spam problems, and outperform blogs as far as product or affiliate sales are concerned.
Summary
Even though many bloggers think that blogging threw out the old school rule book, in fact the techniques are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Just as internet marketers borrowed from offline direct marketers best strategies, bloggers can learn from those that came before too.
About the author: Chris Garrett is a professional blogger and internet marketing consultant. You can read more of his blogging tips, internet marketing advice and copywriting articles at ChrisG.com
