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The Right and Wrong Way to Use Social Media Marketing for Blog Growth

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Earlier this week, I wrote a post that explained the differences between social media marketing and content marketing.  Bloggers can use both methods of marketing their blogs in order to drive traffic to them.  In fact, you’re probably already doing social media marketing and content marketing activities.

But what are the right and wrong ways to market your blog on the social web?

My new book, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, will be released any day now (you can check out a free bonus chapter here), and one of the things I talk about in the book is the difference between social media marketing success and failure.  There are three primary “rights and wrongs” that you need to be aware of as you venture into the world of the social web to promote your blog, grow your audience, and reach your goals.

I call these “rights and wrongs” the 3 Cs of Social Media Marketing Success or Failure, and the chart below can help you understand what these 3 Cs are all about.

Bloggers, just like businesses, who allow the online conversation to flow and let their audience take control of that conversation and experience that content in their own ways will achieve social media marketing and content marketing success.  However, those bloggers, just like businesses, who try to control the conversation and limit the flow of content across the social web will fail.  I clarify this concept in my book by explaining,

“There’s a fine line between behaving on the social web in ways that help you build bridges and acting in ways that cause those bridges to collapse (taking your messages along with them).”

Only you can decide whether you want to fully leverage the power, reach, and influence of the social web by giving up control and releasing your content into the virtual world.  You’ve already started by publishing a blog.  The rest is the easy part.

If you remember nothing else from my posts here on Performancing.com, remember this:

There is no bigger opportunity for businesses of any size (including bloggers and online publishers) to level the playing field, build their brands, and reach their goals than the social web.  You’re already there.  Let it work for you.

So what are you waiting for?  Get out there and publish amazing, shareworthy content and let the compounding effect of blogging deliver long-term, organic and sustainable growth for your blog!

The Laws of Brand Focus and Contraction and Why Bloggers Should Care

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I’m a marketer by profession, and one of the basic laws of building a brand tells us that a highly focused brand is stronger in the long-term than an unfocused brand.  In other words, the most powerful brands own a word in people’s minds.

On the other hand, there is another marketing law that tells us it’s better to be the leader in a category than it is to be better.  That’s because the category leader, meaning the brand that is first to enter that market, owns the broad word that defines the category simply by being first.  Later entrants into the category are challenged with the need to differentiate their own brands from the category leader in order to steal market share from that pioneer brand.  For example, Microsoft might own “operating system” in the world of personal computers, but Apple owns “design”.  Apple effectively positioned its brand against the category leader by differentiating its brand as a market challenger that was focused on a very specific part of the category which the leader couldn’t offer as well as Apple could.  The strategy worked for Apple just as it does for many other brands in many other categories.

And guess what?  It works for blogs, too.

If you take a step back from your blog and the social web, you’ll see that your blog is just one within the broader category of blogs and websites that publish content about your blog topic.  There is probably a leader in that category, and there are many, many smaller competitor blogs in that category.  The first step to finding focus for your blog is determining what that area of focus will be, so you can effectively position your blog against your competitors.  What is the category leader doing and how can you bring your own niche expertise to the category to challenge the leader?

Think of it this way — if you write a blog about parenting, then you have a lot of big competition from established blogs and companies with deep pockets and pre-existing brand awareness to work against.  However, if you find your focus and contract your content and brand to that niche, then your chances of finding long-term blogging success are far greater than if you keep a broad brand and try to compete head on with the bigger players in your category.

Looking at the concept of brand focus from another perspective, consider General Motors.  This is a company that focused on the wrong thing for many years.  Upon seeing the dollar signs that selling large, gas-guzzling vehicles like Hummers could bring to the company’s bottom-line, focus shifted to these money-making brands.  Short-term earnings trumped long-term sustainability for General Motors.  When the economy tanked, so did General Motors.  Today, the Hummer brand is nearly gone and General Motors has been vocally touting its new focus on fuel-efficient vehicles for the future.

Suffice it to say, you don’t want your blog to go the way of General Motors, because a bailout for your blog is unlikely.  Instead, make sure you choose an area of focus, your niche, that has long-term potential, so you can stay competitive and hold your position against the market leader and other blogs in your category.

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Blogging Strategically Not Tactically And 5 Steps to Do It

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If your goals for your blog include growing your audience, developing an online platform to establish yourself as an expert in your field, or making money, then you need to start thinking strategically and not tactically or those goals will always remain just out of reach.

There is a reason why companies create marketing plans — because it takes a broader vision than the day-to-day activities to meet your bigger goals.  You need your own strategic vision and plan for your blog, too.  After all, if your blogging goals include one of those listed in the preceding paragraph, your blog is akin to a mini-business.  It’s time to start thinking like a business owner.

How do you blog strategically rather than tactically?  The first step is to understand what strategy is as opposed to tactics when it comes to marketing.

Strategy is the long term plan or direction you develop for your blog that clearly defines your end goals and what it will take for you to get there.

Tactics are the specific actions you will take to drive your blog along the path of that strategy and reach your goals.

Most marketing plans include both short-term and long-term goals, and therefore, some of the tactics you implement to drive your blog forward in the direction you want it to go will be tactics that elicit immediate responses while others will support your long-term goals and ensure you’re heading in the right direction to reach those goals.

For example, tactics might include holding a blog contest to boost short-term visitors.  However, blog contests can also support your long-term blogging goals because some of those visitors who come to your blog to enter a contest might like what they see in your content and come back again.  Alternately, participating in conversations on Twitter related to your blog’s topic is primarily a marketing tactic intended to indirectly boost traffic to your blog as a result of the relationships you build.  In other words, Twitter activities overall are a strategic, long-term marketing initiative, but specific tweets can be short-term tactics.  You’re unlikely to see big changes in your blog’s traffic overnight when you tweet, but in time, your blog traffic will grow organically from those efforts.

So how do you start blogging strategically rather than tactically?  Following are five basic steps to get you thinking and acting in the right direction:

1. Set your long-term blogging goals.

Believe it or not, many bloggers have not put their long term blogging goals down in writing.  Quantify those goals.  For example, in 2 years you might have a goal to have a specific number of page views on your blog per month.  Now you have something to work toward and you can implement tactics, measure your success, and make changes to those tactics to reach that goal.  Be specific and realistic when you set your goals.

2. Think long-term with every blog post you publish.

Of course there will be days when you won’t be able to publish an amazing blog post.  However, you do need to think before you write each day.  Ask yourself how the post you’re about to write will fit into your long-term blogging strategy.

3. Promote each blog post accordingly to position yourself to meet your goals.

Create an integrated marketing plan where all of your efforts to promote your blog work together to reach your long-term blogging goals.  When you publish a post, think about how you can promote that post to move you closer to reaching your goals.  Is this post worthy of social bookmarking?  Can I start a separate conversation about the post on Facebook?  Should I share this post in a LinkedIn group?  Find the best fit and pursue it.

4. Stick to the 80-20 rule of marketing.

The 80-20 rule of marketing states that 80% of your business comes from just 20% of your customers.  You can switch that up and make it apply to blog promotion by ensuring at least 80% of your online participation across the social web is not self-promotional and no more than 20% is self-promotional.  By focusing on building relationships, you’ll achieve greater success in the long-term.  That’s because your online connections will help you share your content, talk about your blog, and more.  The stronger those relationships become and the more relationships you build with online influencers, the more long-term blogging success you’ll achieve.  That organic, indirect growth in traffic to your blog is worth far more strategically than short-term traffic bursts.

5. Don’t let the day-to-day grind deter you from your long-term blogging goals and strategy.

I think all bloggers are guilty of getting caught up in the daily grind, comments from particularly vociferous visitors who might not have the same vision for your blog or outlook on your blog’s topic as you do, and pressure to think and write a certain way.  If you see yourself falling into that trap, take a few days off to regroup.  Pull out your written long-term blog goals that you created in #1 above, and remind yourself why you started your blog in the first place and what you want to achieve from all of your time and efforts.  Tweaking your goals and strategy is perfectly fine when warranted.  However, always think strategically and long-term rather than being swayed by short-term occurrences or bumps in the road.

So what are you waiting for?  Go write down your blogging goals and start putting together your strategy to get there!

Are Blogrolls Defunct?

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blogrollThe blogroll was once an essential part of every blog.  Today, that’s no longer the case.  More and more bloggers have removed the traditional blogroll from their blog sidebars and replaced it — believing that a blogroll is not an effective use of the valuable real estate on a blog’s sidebar.

In simplest terms, the shift in thinking from “blogroll cricital” to “blogroll not very important” has evolved as bloggers determined their blogrolls did not deliver an adequate return on their investments (in this case, the investment is the blogger’s time and the space allocated to the blogroll in the sidebar).

So is the blogroll truly defunct or is there still value in having a traditional blogroll in your blog’s sidebar?

Naturally, different bloggers have different views on this topic, and only you can decide what’s best for your blogging goals and your audience.  If your goals for your blog include making money and building a larger audience, then every little bit of space on your blog should be filled with something that adds value either to the user experience or to your overall business plan for your blog.

Still not sure what to do with that blogroll?  Think of it this way – if an ad on your blog wasn’t bringing in revenue, you’d replace it.  The same line of thinking should apply to your blogroll.  If your blogroll isn’t helping you reach your blogging goals, you should replace it.

If you’re still not sure what to do with your blogroll, take a look at your blog analytics using a tool like Google Analytics to learn if visitors to your blog are actually clicking on the links in your blogroll.  On the flip side, look at where incoming traffic is coming from to your blog in an effort to determine how many people are finding your blog through other blogrolls versus links within blog posts, comments, etc.  Blogrolls work both ways in terms of driving traffic — outgoing to other blogs you recommend and incoming from other blogs where you’re blog is included in other blogrolls to your blog.  Analyze both effects to determine if your blogroll truly adds direct or indirect value to your blog.

If you decide to keep a traditional blogroll in your blog’s sidebar, make an effort to keep it up-to-date.  A blogroll that’s cluttered with blogs that are no longer updated or irrelevant to your blog’s topic and audience (for example, you linked to a blog out of reciprocal linking courtesy), is not useful and can actually damage the user experience on your blog.

So you have three choices when it comes to blogrolls: keep a traditional blogroll in your blog’s sidebar, delete your blogroll from your blog completely, or replace your blogroll with a single, separate page of recommended reading and links.   This final option is becoming more and more popular as a way to keep some form of a blogroll without sacrificing space on a blog’s sidebar.

It’s up to you to evaluate your goals and analyze how you’re using the space on your blog in order to meet those goals.  Just remember, you have choices, and just because another blogger is doing something, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for your blog, too.

What do you think?  Do you still have a traditional blogroll on your blog?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.