5 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Blog

Most digital marketers now realize the real benefits of inbound marketing to their marketing activities. If properly annexed, inbound marketing usually brings the right people to your business website. That means traffic, good traffic in the main. The main goal of inbound marketing is to bring people who’re most likely to buy what you’re selling. That means the people who recognized the need for your product/service who tend to need just a little nudge to take the final step to buy. As at today, blogging is, by far, one of the most efficient and result-oriented inbound marketing strategies available to digital marketers, and its benefits are widely recognized by most marketers. If you don’t have a blog on your website, the time to create one is now if you really want to boost the inbound marketing strategy of your business.

If however you already own a blog and you are desirous to grow it, below are tried and tested inbound marketing strategies most bloggers are using to grow their blogs.

1. Boost Your Landing-Page Strategy

A good blog must have an effective landing page strategy to get results. This is because landing pages usually serve the purpose of helping to market your product/service. More specifically and with the right strategy, landing pages actively serve to encourage customers to take some desired action among other numerous benefits such as:

- attracting more traffic and conversions
- giving the first good impression to your website visitors
- making your visitors stay longer on your website
- generating more leads as a result
- helping to build credibility for your business
- offering the right solutions to your audience’s problems
- starting to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your audience

To get these results, you must make your landing page strategy an inevitable part of your overall inbound marketing strategies as a blogger. To do this right, be sure to pick a relevant and interesting topic in your niche your audience will love. Test different landing pages for maximum efficiency before you settle for what works best. Don’t forget to make a CTA button obvious to your audience by placing it correctly in your landing page. You’ll manage to get these results from your landing page if you don’t clutter it up with irrelevant massages.

2. Use More Long-Form Content

High quality and interesting content on a blog helps it to attract traffic. Additionally, the content should be long-form. This is because long-from content is more likely to become viral and gets much more links than regular-length blog posts. If the content is long-form, it has the potential to improve your website’s rankings on the SERPs of search engines. Through that, it will help to create organic traffic to your website, generate quality links for it, and consequently establish good authority for your business in its niche.

3. Use Captivating Headlines

This is rather obvious in content marketing. The more captivating your blog headlines are, the more attention they get and the more traffic they attract. If you are a blogger, the first thing your audience will see on your blog is the headline. It is the quality of this headline that usually determines whether or not people will click on the link and read your blog post. It is therefore advisable to always make sure you spend enough quality time thinking through your headlines and crafting one that will spark the reader’s interest.

4. Give Real Value to Your Readers

Most online surfers are always there to solve one problem or another. Your blog succeeds if it helps provide them with solutions. Therefore, if you want to succeed in your inbound marketing efforts, your blog must always give something of value in addition to quality content to your readership. Some of such things of value include downloadable materials such as research data, e-books, biz quizzes, online courses, and so on. Thus, your blog must be seen to be providing value and not just outright selling. Providing value is important because it helps to increase your brand’s reputation, increases the trust your audience has for your business, and the overall value of your brand.

5. Do Some Niche Guest Posting

Guest posting remains one of the most important inbound marketing strategies available to bloggers. It is good for quality backlinking to your website. However, you must take adequate care to ensure you only do guest posting on quality websites because links quality is very important to search engines. For this reason, having a solid amount of links back to your website is a good idea, but the quality of such links is hugely important. If generally you deliberately do more guest-posting on the quality websites that are in the same niche as yours, you’ll be able to increase your traffic and reach potential customers much more efficiently than doing link building on just any website. For bloggers who want to grow their blogs, guest posts bring a lot of value for their businesses. This value includes providing backlinks, increasing the website’s ranking, promoting brand authority and communicating effectively with the audience that may turn out to be good leads and trusted customers.

How to Monetize a Low-Traffic Blog

With the increasing popularity of blogging as a credible way to make money online, many experienced bloggers tend to over emphasize the real importance of traffic to a blog. Yes, every blog needs traffic, mostly real organic traffic to make money, but you can still make money with your blog even if the inbound traffic is not yet fantastic. If the number of visitors to your blog is still considerably low, do not be discouraged in your blogging efforts, you can still monetize it to make money. To do so, you don’t really need the often recommended monetization strategies like affiliate marketing, paid ads, Google Adsense and a host of others because these methods depend on huge traffic before they make good money for you. Not to worry though! You can still make money from your blog even if it is yet to be hugely popular with a lot of inbound traffic.


 
Here is what works to make money from a low-traffic blog.

Freelance Blogging

You can make money from blogging by blogging for other sites and brands. By doing so, the money you make will not depend directly on the number of visitors you attract daily. You will make money by cooperating directly with brands, agencies, and corporate bodies who are always in search of skillful bloggers to work with. All you need are relevant skillsets such as WordPress, SEO, Social Media and persuasive skills. You must in addition to these skills be able to really understand the audience of any particular brand. If you understand the audience well enough and what it needs, it becomes easier for you to create relevant content that spurs them into action. To be a successful freelance blogger, you can incorporate in your own blog the option to hire you as a freelance blogger. More like an open invitation though! The most popular option however is by registering as an agency on any major freelancing websites, such as Problogger. Apart from making you look more professional, registering as an agency with a freelancing website helps to position you to be well known as an in-demand freelance blogger and not just an ordinary freelancer who may neither have the requisite skills nor experience in blogging.

Virtual Coaching
 
If your blog has limited traffic and you are keen on finding a credible way to make money from blogging, you can look the way of virtual coaching. No matter what niche your blog is involved in, it will not get the desired effect on readers if it does not affect them in one of or all three ways of business, life or personal. Once your blog manages to help provide solutions to its readers along these three ways, it is bound to be effective. It doesn’t really matter the niche of your blog, once it offers online coaching service to motivated consumers, you can make some money. By giving expert advice on your blog through consistent content, you can sell your expertise as a business, life or personal coach. Even if your blog only gets limited traffic, you can still get your expertise to go viral by way of social media channels to attract real patronage and you make money as a result.

Selling Online Courses
 
One other profitable strategy to monetize a low-traffic is to create and sell courses online. If your blog niche has to do with exercises and fitness, you can create and sell “how-to” courses to help people benefit from your knowledge in their own private times and chosen places of convenience for them. Just find any popular area of human need you have the knowledge and you can create and sell courses on it to make money, more particularly now that virtual learning is on the rise. Any course you can create which somehow helps to address and solve major human needs/problems, people will buy it from you online if it is well packaged and presented.


 
Virtual Summit

For many bloggers even those with very low inbound traffic to their blogs, a new way to make money online nowadays is by way of virtual summits. This too is another way of selling expert knowledge online. Because most bloggers already know that Media Influencers usually bring engagement, expansion of reach, and credibility with them, they now use virtual summits to link up with such Influencers with a view building long-lasting relationships. Now, everyone I know always wants to hear directly from the experts. These are people who have made it or are still making it. This is the major selling point of virtual summits. Virtual summits are basically visual contents like short video interviews on any topic of interest with industry experts, celebrities, other bloggers, and business industry experts and so on. Viewers are then given the “opt-in” opportunity to subscribe and watch these videos online over a limited period of time. They need to purchase access pass to view these videos. When the time expires, they will need to purchase more access time to watch more and this costs money which the blogger makes as income. If you choose a good topic of discussion and your experts/influencers are well known, they come along with their own audience which helps you to grow your own audience as well. You can make money by selling your back-end product to this enhanced audience and from the summit subscription fees.

Private Label Rights, PLRs

What really attracts bloggers to selling PLR products is because they save themselves the drudgery and stress of having to create the products/content afresh. Even if your expertise is very limited on any field, you can easily repackage the works of an expert in the field and place under your own label before selling. Basically, PLR products are pre-written content that you can claim as your own without incurring any legal action from plagiarism. It is one clever way to leverage other people’s products and use it to create your own products even if your expert knowledge in the field is severely limited. You can use PLR articles to write a Kindle book related to any important topic of your choosing then sell the book from your blog. On the alternative, if you want to improve the readership and popularity of your blog, you can also use PLR articles to generate content for it. If you want to make money with PLR products, you must take cognizance of these three major attributes. Firstly, they must be published in limited circulation. Secondly, they must be written by a reputable and well known author. Thirdly, they must have been recently developed. It is only PLR products with these attributes that can help you to easily make money online.
 

Why Your Business Needs Visual Content Marketing

Visual content marketing simply means marketing online with pictures/images. It is a very powerful content marketing tool which incites the human mind to deliver information and tell the brand story in a more compelling and captivating way. For compelling results, most marketers prefer packaging their visual content messages using images, videos, infographics and memes. These are the means needed to deliver valuable and relevant information in an engaging visual format compelling favourable responses. In comparison with written content, visual content always has a higher impact on a human’s mind and a combination of both gives fantastic results. The real reason digital marketers and business owners are making use of them as a real potent marketing strategy.

These here are the main direct benefits of visual content marketing for any online marketing business. 

Better Customer Engagement

 

The reason most social media sites are very popular is because of ease of use and engagement. They manage to combine visual content and written content for best results. Most marketers are aware that visual content is more engaging and powerful than written content. They take advantage of that by adding pictures and graphics to their written content. That combination helps to make marketing campaigns more interesting and effective. It enhances better customer engagement, leads and sales. 

Increased Inbound Website Traffic

 

Every online marketer always wants traffic and more traffic. Anything that helps to increase inbound traffic is always welcome. If you are able to deploy visual content effectively, it gives a unique touch to your website and helps to grab the reader’s attention much more readily. That is good for traffic. It is smart to play around with words to show the value of your products and services. It is smarter still to make use of visuals as well or you can use both to have a greater impact on your audience. That helps to generate inbound traffic for your business. 

Boosts Conversion Rates

 

Many marketers are beginning to realize the importance of visual content marketing strategy to increase conversion rates. Visual contents can even be more effective especially when added to landing pages of websites. It is no longer secret that when marketers implement a successful visual content marketing strategy, it greatly helps to generate leads and increase sales. It is now known also that Brand’s videos are responsible for influencing 80-90% of viewers to get to know about a product/service and even to make a buying decision by simply watching a video.

Easy Brand Recognition

 

There is credible research evidence that 65% of people learn more through visuals. “Seeing is believing” that is! Most people tend to comprehend better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words. Because of that, if you want to raise brand awareness among your target audience, it is smart to incorporate visual content marketing strategy in your overall marketing plans. With time, such strategy helps to gradually increase your brand recognition. You can get the best results by making good use of infographics and banner images in your website/blogs to attract readers. For sustained results, expert marketers advise that you check your business website/blog and landing pages always. Update them with compelling graphics, icons, photos, videos and other visuals as regularly and routinely as every month.