email marketing campaign

The Come-up: How Can Amateur Blogs Grow?

David Sharpe bio

9% of bloggers make between $1,000-$9,999 a month. While many dream of entering this earnings bracket it' easy to get stuck in the world of amateur blogs. That's because there are some important steps that are needed for blogging success.

Not sure where to start? Read on for more tips on going from amateur blogs to full-time blogger.

The Difference Between Amateur Blogs and Professional Blogs

It seems like these days everyone has their own blog on a wide variety of subjects. However, you want to dive into the emotional side of taking your amateur blog and raising it to a high-end commercial blog level.

While a major element of successful blogging is time, there are various branding, styling, and marketing aspects that can dictate the success of a blog.

Whether you're looking to turn your blog into a side hustle or full-time gig, read on to learn more about the important tips that can make your blog a success.

A Target Niche

As we stated earlier, there is no end to the number of blogs currently running online. Due to this fact, it can be difficult to stand out among the crowd.

An easy way to avoid this problem is by carving out a niche market from the get-go. For example, instead of having a healthy food blog, you may decide to have a vegan food blog with a focus on Asian and international cuisine.

The more defined you can be within your market the easier it will be to stand out as an original voice.

A Backstory

Many bloggers operate under the misconception that in order to write about a certain subject they have to be an expert on it. However, it doesn't matter if you're an industry expert or novice.

What your audience is really looking for is a unique voice and back story. Your audience wants to connect, and feel that they truly know you on a deeper level.

For example, sticking with the example of Asian cuisine, perhaps you have no experience in preparing Asian cuisine but married into an Asian family and are deciding to pursue the cuisine type in an effort to connect with your husband.

Maybe you even throw in a funny story on when you batched a favorite family dish.

Readers want to find someone with a touch of experience and plenty of character.

A Professional Look

Research has shown that a majority of website visitors will leave the website if they find it unattractive. To avoid this it's important to make your website both beautiful and user-friendly.

The good news is you don't have to be a master web designer in order to create a beautiful blog. There are a number of web design platforms that come with pre-created templates that are ready to go.

As the success of your blog grows and you're able to bring in some extra money, you may consider hiring a web designer to upgrade the site.

However, to get started an elegant template site should do the trick.

Photoshop Skills

Even the most beautiful meal can look gray and dull without the use of a proper camera and some basic Photoshop skills.

Again, this doesn't mean you need to be an expert, it just means that you need to know enough to ensure that your photos look good.

A simple visit to Pinterest or other photography related blogs should give you the information you need to create stellar photos.

You also don't need to invest in an expensive camera. The cameras found on today's smartphones can easily compete with some of the higher end, professional grade cameras currently on the market.

With the help of a handy iPhone, the right apps, and a great design eye, you will be able to create stunning photos that can compete with any popular blog.

Saying Just Enough

If you have visited blogs in the past, chances are you'll find that some blogs have a tendency to overshare ( i.e. you know the children's names, ages and shoe sizes). Yeah, people don't need to know that much.

Then there are some blogs that really don't share anything personal.We believe the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

This means you can get away with not sharing intimate childhood memories while still sharing the fact that a recipe’s inspiration came from your son's recent birthday party.

Try to allow at least 5 -10% of your blog post to be based on real-life anecdotal stories.

Remember, by the time your audience reads through a few blogs they should feel like they are a good friend catching up with you over coffee.

A Great Content Grab

You'll find there are recurring themes in each of the successful blogs you visit. You enter the website and not long after you've gotten there a familiar pop up appears on your screen with some cool offering.

This pop-up usually offers some kind of valuable content in the form of a list or a guide that you will receive in exchange for your email address.

This type of email grab is extremely popular on blogs due to their high rate of success. Not only does the content grab push the person to give their email address, but it then trains them to head directly to their email account to look for your email.

This marks the beginning of a habit.

Also, it's important to remember that there's a much higher retention rate for those who opt to receive something than those who feel like they're being spammed by email messages.

The stronger your list the better your following. More on that next.

A Strong Email Campaign

There are a number of people that are operating under the false belief that email marketing is dead. However, it continues to be one of the most successful marketing tools that can be used.

Successful bloggers understand that their audience has a life. Which is why they have a consistent email campaign to keep their blog on the forefront of their audience's memory.

A valuable email campaign does not have to be loaded with content. After all, that's what your blog is there for.

Instead, it should read more like a short letter penned by a dear friend. Obviously, within that letter, there will be a link pointing the reader to your most recent blog post.

Not only is this a great way to reach out to your audience from time to time, but it's also another opportunity to forge a relationship with them.

A Steady Social Media Flow

Successful bloggers understand the value of social media and leave no platform untouched. From Facebook to Twitter, and even Pinterest, the most engaging bloggers are those that know which type of content their audience responds to.

Social media is also a valuable tool as it gives your readers the opportunity to share your content. Enter word-of-mouth advertising.

Some bloggers even create closed Facebook groups for their audience. This creates a feeling of exclusivity that audiences love.

Monetizing Your Blog

Successful blog owners also know that they have to be direct in their attempts to monetize their blogs.

Fortunately, there is more than one way to earn income off of your blog content. Read on to learn more about earning a solid income for all of your hard work.

Advertising Space

Remember we said that later on, you may want to go back and hire a web designer? Having extra advertising space is a great reason to do just that.

Once you can prove that you have consistent traffic coming to your website, you can start to show these results to potential advertisers who will pay you to run their ads on your website. Remember, advertisers love to see those results!

There are also third-party services that will connect you to those looking for advertising and genres similar to yours.

Sponsorships

Who doesn't love free stuff? As a successful blogger, these are just one of the many perks you have to look forward to. Different companies may contact you to represent them by including their product in a recipe or simply mentioning it on your blog.

While many of the sponsorships are done simply for trade or free products, some also compensate with good old cash.

Guest posting

Once you've grown a solid following there are other websites that could benefit from such exposure. This means you can get paid to write blogs that are featured on other people's websites. Which is the big goal here right?

Typically this requires that you direct your audience to the other website to make it worth their while. However, you will find that guest posting can become another lucrative source of income.

The Help You Need to Boot Your Blog Business

With the right marketing effort, amateur blogs can become money making machines. However, marketing often comes with a stark learning curve that can be difficult to overcome.

If you liked this guide on how to

Click for free training

 

5 Ways an Email Marketing Strategy Helps Your SEO

David Sharpe bio

Did you know that even today, email marketing is a widespread strategy? After all, more than 97% of all businesses use this strategy. They use it to convert recipients to potential buyers.

Among these subscribers, around 76% of them make new purchases. They base these from emails they received.

This paints SEO email marketing as a great way to convert people using different methods. You can always look for the right digital marketing services around. This helps to fit your business goals and infrastructure.

But it doesn’t stop here. Are you ready to learn how email marketing affects your SEO efforts? Read on and find out more today:

1. Drive the Right Traffic to Your Website

This is the most obvious benefit of starting an email marketing campaign. But if you’re doing this, you need to ensure that you put a big emphasis on qualified traffic. This means you need to focus on the visitors likely to make any type of conversion as soon as they visit.

The best way to use email marketing is to ensure that they look personalized. Marketers use personalization to get their audience’s attention. But they’re more likely to use it on email compared to any other means of marketing.

Due to this, customers have this expectation that their email newsletters coincide with their personal interests. Some studies proved that people only subscribe to email due to its relevance. That’s why it’s important to make the type of content that’s relevant to your intended audience.

If you live up to your customers’ expectations, you’ll become more confident. You’re assured that you’re driving more traffic to your website. They’re the people you want since their likelihood of converting is higher than others.

How to Make Use of Email Marketing to Drive Traffic

Is your business still on the fence with email marketing? If so, it’s fortunate that you don’t have to go through complicated processes to get started. It’s easy to send emails tailored to your specific audience’s wants and needs—start by segmenting your list.

A good example is to let your audience choose the type of emails they want to get. They can do this once they subscribe to your newsletter. If you do, you’re only sending your subscribers the emails they want.

This helps you make content for each customer segment’s preferences.

2. Improve On-Site Engagement

As you attract qualified traffic to your business website, you can now get more readers. Often, they become more willing to spend more time engaging your content. The result is that you get the means of increasing their time on your pages.

It also helps in lowering the rates of exit from your website. The biggest benefit is that they’re more likely to convert. It happens since they become more invested in your content.

It goes side by side with on-site engagement metrics since it improves your SEO ratings. Remember, time on side and bounce rates both contribute with your SEO rankings. It’s especially the case when you’re trying to run in Google.

You need to become more effective at driving your subscribers to the content that makes them interested. If you do, you become more visible to search engines as time goes by. It’s most important to get noticed by the search engine titans especially Google since it holds about 92% of the entire search engine market.

3. Develop a More Focused Content Strategy

Good email marketers will test and analyze a few different elements in each of their sent emails. The most common among these is the subject lines. A lot of marketers say that they will do tests on a regular basis over the course of their email marketing campaigns.

Other marketers say that they’ll test the messaging while others will modify the calls to action. If you already have an email marketing strategy in place, you might already have a trove of data. This will include the email elements you test whenever you send emails.

With this data, you can gain some valuable insight on what to use for your digital marketing strategy. This will include your on-site optimization methods. It’s possible since all your recipients are already components of your intended audience.

That means you can make informed decisions based on your email list’s preferences. This will affect both your website and other marketing channels. It’s only possible when you try using your emails to get a feel of what your audience best responds to.

4. Make High-Performing Emails into New Website Content

There are a lot of approaches you can use when trying to make newsletters. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can read this amazing guide to know what mistakes you need to avoid. That will prevent you from getting into disastrous results that can cripple your business’s reputation.

Regardless, a great approach is to make original content that fits your subscribers’ tastes. That means you need to choose topics with high relevance to their needs. For example, if you’re a finance business, you should pick content focusing on trending topics in the finance industry.

Another way to improve email marketing as a lead generation tool is to center your topics on things other outlets haven’t covered yet. Doing this might sound like a lot of effort compared to writing about something already covered before. But the caveat is that all your efforts are worth the leap in engagement rates.

But even if you don’t want to go through that effort, you can always republish your email newsletters on your website’s blog. The main reason is that it still benefits your SEO rankings in some form. You need to make sure that it’s high-quality, original content so that it ranks better.

5. Increase Social Media Shares

With email marketing, you can put your content in front of a more interested audience. That means you’ll increase the chances of each content piece getting social media platform shares. It holds better when you’re encouraging your subscribers to share your content using their own social media accounts.

You can connect this with your SEO strategies since the increased social visibility can boost your SEO ratings. It’s especially important if you’re using the Facebook platform since it has about 2.27 billion monthly active users. With email marketing working with social media, you can expect to find better link opportunities and build better partnerships with your audience.

Google neither confirmed nor denied that social media plays a part in their ranking algorithm. But there’s evidence that social shares affect your search visibility. Studies conclude that getting more social shares will work to your business’s favor.

How to Use the Right SEO E-Marketing Service

If you opt to use email marketing software to help with your marketing efforts, you need to know a few things. This will help ensure that you get the most out of what you pay for. Here are some things you need to consider:

Features

There are a lot of features you need to think of when picking the right email marketing service. But it’s important to remember that your goals and methods will determine the overall impact of each feature.

Unlimited Emails

Depending on your business size, you might want to avoid a vendor that puts a cap to the number of emails you can send. Ensure that they can accommodate your email marketing campaign, regardless of its size. If you need to send a million email to different customers, you need to have the means of doing so.

Analytics

The most important feature for any email marketing service is analytics. You need to have the means of tracking, reporting, and analyzing the email campaign. Pick a service that gives you a more comprehensive and detailed analysis in real-time.

Survey Apps

Is your email marketing campaign centered around customer surveys? If so, your provider should have a suite of customizable survey applications in their arsenal. That way, customers can answer without getting inconvenienced.

User Segments

Another important part of customizing your email campaign is to tailor emails to different customer types. With message segments, you can make your email campaign more effective. If your email marketing vendor doesn’t have this feature, avoid them and find a better one.

Ease of Use

Email marketing applications are only great when you can understand their use. The best ones will have an intuitive user interface with a gentle learning curve. This helps you concentrate on the marketing campaign while improving your email marketing capabilities.

Use SEO E-Marketing Today!

SEO email marketing remains as one of the best ways to market your business. It helps you target your audience better and drive the right type of traffic to your website. That way, you won’t waste your efforts trying to woo an uninterested audience.

If you enjoyed this SEO email marketing guide, check out our free webclass where you can learn other digital marketing secrets to guide more traffic into your website and build your wallet up.

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