Marketing is my thing. Like this is what I sell to my clients every day. And I’m so impossibly shit at doing it for myself; it’s really pathetic. So, what did I do today? I planned to rectify this situation a bit. Let’s just say that I’m my worst enemy sometimes, and my harshest critic.
I am terrified of social media. There I said it. I’m scared of the very thing that makes my business possible. But it’s not in the way you may think…
I made what most would call a big mistake: I deleted about half of my blog posts from five years ago. I spent months reading into the repercussions of this and how it would affect my Google search rank, and how it would impact the volume of my blog. None of it mattered in the end.
After writing for nearly eight years, I grew as a writer, and will continue to grow. I read some of the content from way back when and wondered why the hell I wrote about that. Why would I have written 573 words of nothing. My writing goals were very different back then. I was writing to make noise. Today, I am writing to make a point. At least I hope that I make a point.
“If you write it, they will come.”
No. They won’t.
Yes, they will.
No. They won’t.
Well, maybe ten years ago.
But, not today.
Blogging is not just about writing a couple articles and calling it a day. You have to research, write, edit, edit, edit, format, insert rich media content, *preview*, then publish. THEN the work really begins.
After you hit that publish button, what do you think happens? Do you think that some random magic blog fairy will tell all her fairy friends and they will shower you with traffic? Maybe in someone’s fantasy world, but not in the real world.
You have to publish it on social media networks, you have to email the links to all your friends and ask them to share it with their friends, and so on.
Little by little the traffic will grow, but you have to work hard. Your blog is a brand, and you have to do put in the man hours to make that brand popular, unless you don’t care about your blog, then you can just move along to my next article.
Every day, you have to network a little on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else you think your traffic lives. If you’re a serious blogger, I would even suggest buying some Google and Facebook ads to generate some traffic, and hopefully, you will be able to keep that traffic.
Then you have newsletters, which are so important now. You have to send consistent newsletters to keep everyone in the loop about your blog’s latest content. And putting together a newsletter takes time and some level of skill, and lots of Youtubing.
You also have to share your evergreen content (the content which is relevent no matter the date it was published). Tools like Buffer come in handy for this because you can buffer that content and then scroll through the list later on and rebuffer.
The great thing about this is that you can do this yourself, for just 15-30 minutes a day. And it’s not hard stuff, it’s hard to remember to do for most of us. People who write creatively are sometimes not the same kinds of people who will remember the somewhat mundane, routine tasks. But once you look at it as a part of your blogging routine, and it’s on the same priority levels as your blog, then you’ll be on the right track. It’s all a part of the wonderful world of blogging 🙂
From TILT Creative