How to Market Your WordPress Blog Effectively

Having a sound marketing plan is absolutely essential to the success of your WordPress site or blog. Not having a strategy in place may compromise the success of your WordPress blog, deeming all your hard work to waste. Therefore, I always advise my clients to dedicate a fair amount of time developing a marketing plan with me before the big launch.

Marketing Your WordPress Site

Maybe because I am a Marketing major, this is perhaps the most fun-filled aspect of setting up a WordPress site for me. I absolutely love the whole process of planning a marketing campaign and then executing it in style. The design geek in me rejoices each time I help my clients achieve a visually appealing marketing campaign that is way more than its looks.

What Are You Trying To Sell?

Before we start anything else, I will ask you to take a moment and ask yourself what is it that you are offering.

Now, I am sure that you’ve already answered this question a million times in the past but the reason I ask this is more so as a reminder than just being redundant.

Developing The Marketing Plan

So you already know what it is that you want to promote. It can be your blog, ebook, design services, coaching lesson, etc. whatever it is that you want to sell it is vital that you decipher its nature. For instance, promoting your blog would be done in a different manner, than, say, promoting your ebook. However, some successful marketing campaigns tend to incorporate different products or services to promote a particular products. For instance, in order to promote your web design services, aka your website, you would use your blog to build up good SEO, establish your brand’s awareness, and engage in solid link building. You’d also use your Social Media Channels to broadcast your blog posts and such to create a loyal following. If you want to further establish your brand’s image, you might start a newsletter for your blog that would also subtly promote your web design services.

As you can see, there are several ways to promote a product, blog, or services; it entirely depends on what kind of outcome you want.

Many bloggers and entrepreneurs would set up a system as follows (this is something that I particularly do as well):

• Set up the website
• Set up a blog
• Regularly post and update the blog
• Develop premium content such as eCourses and eBooks
• Set up a newsletter/mailing list to promote the blog’s activities
• Promote the blog and services through social media
• Build an online community or be an active part of one

All the above activities have one purpose: to promote you or your offerings. To achieve this, they try to establish your brand as an expert in the industry by showcasing your knowledge and expertise through your blog posts and social media communities. This is what content marketing means essentially: you produce solid content that showcases your expertise, helps earn the trust of your potential clients, and hence effectively markets your brand by converting them into actual clients.

Brand Appearance

It is very very very important that your brand stands out and attracts the right clients. Due to the fact that brand is such an essential part of the success of your business, I am developing a whole-new course that will go live hopefully in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Regardless, I will briefly touch upon this as it is very important for us to understand how our brand helps us achieve our goals, be it to increase sales or the following of our blog.

An effective brand does one thing: it helps you stand out of the crowd that ultimately attracts the right clients. In order to achieve that, your brand needs to be cohesive in nature and clearly reflect the core of your business. Since this topic is very broad, I will concise it by just focusing on the appearance and aesthetics of it and how it can be incorporated in your marketing plan.

Be Cohesive

No matter what kind of a marketing plan you’ve developed, it is a very good practice to implement a cohesive brand image through out your marketing activities. For instance, through your social media channels, it is wise to use the same colour palette that you use for your brand and its website.

The idea is that when a potential client is exposed to any of your marketing campaigns they immediately recognize your brand. This helps with familiarity that further helps establish trust, which is very important.

Therefore, I tend to use the same template to produce my pins for marketing my blog posts on Pinterest, as well as develop similar looking Twitter cards and Facebook post graphics so that when someone views them, they immediately know who they’re from. In fact, if you’ve done some digging or have idols, you’d note that most, if not all, of the successful entrepreneurs, businesses, or bloggers have a brand strategy that they strictly follow.

Due to the above reasons, I urge you to form a cohesive brand image before making or executing a marketing campaign.

The Ultimate Resource List

You’ve spent hours and hours planning your marketing campaign and just need to execute it – now what? Well, for starters, you need proper tools to help you with that. For those of us who aren’t yet swimming with the big fish and can’t really afford tools like Hubspot or Infusionsoft, there are other tools that are affordable yet extremely effective *yay*

Below is the list of tools and resources that I swear by:

• Leadpages: This is one of the most popular lead generating tools used by many entrepreneurs, bloggers, and coaches that seek to establish a strong online presence with a loyal following. This platform helps you create striking landing pages, forms, modals, that can be integrated with WordPress, Facebook, Mailchimp, Convertkit and the likes. If you’re a blogger or trying to establish a loyal following, chances are you need to generate leads by offering freebies or bribes to attract people to sign up or follow your WordPress blog. In that case, Leadpages is an excellent platform as it helps you do just that, only it simplifies the process so much that it is actually enjoyable.

• Convertkit: Becoming more and more popular among authors and bloggers, Convertkit is a email marketing automation tool. It has helped several bloggers, coaches, and authors market their eCourses, Newsletters, or any kind of Digital Freebies to help attract and maintain a loyal email following. Now, some argue that Convertkit may entirely replace Leadpages, as it also offers landing pages, pop up forms and more. I personally use this tool to host my eCourses such as this one or to send any broadcasts to my mailing list and it is absolutely a dream to work with!

• Thriveleads & Landing Pages: This is a WordPress plugin that I use instead of Leadpages. It effectively helps me build and maintain a solid mailing list by creating landing pages, striking forms, pop ups, floating bars, widgets and so on. I absolutely love it.

• Hootsuite: As many of your may be aware of this tool, it is a social media management application that helps you automate and manage your social media presence. I personally use it to manage and schedule posts on my Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram account. In order to build a sound social media following, consistency is key. Therefore, it is wise to follow a set schedule when posting on your channels and Hootsuite can help you do that.

• CoSchedule: I’ve recently hopped on the band-wagon and started using CoSchedule. I am only disappointed about the fact I didn’t start sooner. This tool is a lifesaver when it comes to scheduling and sharing your WordPress blog posts. However, the tool does not just rely on WordPress, you can also use it solely for your social media channels. I use this tool to schedule my WordPress blog posts, schedule the posts to be broadcasted on my social media channels and to analyze which posts are doing well and which are not. It also has a very handy tool which scores your blog’s title to tell you whether or not its good enough – sweet right? 

• YOAST SEO Plugin: This is perhaps the most essential plugin you will need to market your WordPress website and/or blog. As we all know, the whole basis for content marketing other than establish your brand’s awareness is to help with Google’s search engine ranking. We do this by working on our Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order to help us do this, the YOAST SEO plugin helps us choose a keyword for each page or post and guides us to correctly optimize our content based on it.
  

Since there are tons and tons of applications and tools that will help you with your marketing campaigns and activities, I am going to end my list here as these are my primary tools that I use to promote my blog and my offerings. If you need help or any further information regarding these shoot me an email and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions 🙂

Setting Up Your Marketing Plan Before Launch

Now, it is very important to have a solid marketing plan in place before considering to launch your website and/or your services. Too many times a business is launched way too prematurely, which results in its failure. Due to this, I always ask my clients to create the content and marketing plan of their website before we even begin to plan its launch. Therefore, spend as much time as you need in developing your marketing plan and set up your tools and resources to help implement it.

Happy planning!

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