Blog Marketing

Writing your blog posts is only half the battle. Once you have created awesome content, learn the following blog marketing strategies to promote your blog. Also, be sure to check out the Ultimate Guide to Blog Post Promotion for more ways to promote individual blog post content for increased traffic and social engagement.

Why Bloggers Need to Build a Subscriber List

by Christine Brady on April 25, 2012 · 64 comments

This is a guest post by Christine Brady of Insightful Mommy.

If you have been blogging for any length of time, you have no doubt heard the phrase list building or building a list of subscribers. But what does building a list of subscribers have to do with blogging you may be wondering…

As bloggers, your focus is much like mine – creating great content to share with our readers, staying active on social media, connecting and promoting your blog. But every one of the daily task that we work hard on are all subject to finding your audience.

And unfortunately, your audience may not always follow your blog or follow you on social media. Some may have your blog loaded in their RSS, but what about the readers that don’t?

You need a way to reach them. This is where building a list of subscribers becomes a vital part of your online business strategy.

Let’s face it – list building is all the rage in the Internet Marketing arena. There are Internet Marketers out there who run their businesses solely based on their list on subscribers. Some don’t even have a blog or a Twitter account, but they have a subscriber list that they care for and nurture.

That is an incredible business model – and one that we bloggers are in a great position to pick up on. Bloggers are actually in an even better spot as we have mastered great content and know how to connect with our audience.

The idea of building a subscriber list is not complicated as it may seem.

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6 High-Converting Areas To Add An Email Sign-Up Form & Build Your List

by Ricardo Bueno on April 4, 2012 · 48 comments

This is a guest post by Ricardo Bueno.

mail box

We all want more email subscribers. The question is, how do you get them?

Aside from creating high quality, compelling content, you need to promote your email sign-up form so readers know where to go to sign up.

The easier you make it to sign up, the more likely readers are to subscribe. This means, doing the following:

  • Displaying your email sign up forms prominently on your site.
  • Designing your form so that it stands out (compelling headline & contrasting color scheme).
  • Using social proof to persuade readers to subscribe.
  • Making it easy to subscribe (the fewer the fields, the better).

A good email sign-up form will possess each of those qualities.

Once you’ve done that, all that’s left to do is promote your email sign-up form so first-time site visitors and readers know where to subscribe. Here’s a list of high-converting places to add your email sign-up form on your website…

Continue 6 High-Converting Areas To Add An Email Sign-Up Form & Build Your List

Blogging Your Way to Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales with Danny Iny

by Danny on March 28, 2012 · 55 comments

This is an interview with Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing. He’s returned to Kikolani to talk to us about how he wrote 80+ guest posts on major blogs in less than a year, earned the nickname “The Freddy Krueger of Blogging”, and skyrocketed Firepole Marketing to success with his Write Like Freddy blog writing training program (aff link).

1. A lot of the readers here at Kikolani would love to get more traffic, subscribers, and sales (as you say), but don’t know where to start. What are they missing?

Well, in my experience, most people are missing one of two things.

The first thing is that Content is King. The truth is that a lot of people make things much more complicated than they have to be; “traffic” becomes this mysterious thing that you try to “drive” to your blog. Every day we stumble onto a new “strategy”, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, SEO, Pinterest, or whatever. We never completely understand how this “strategy” is supposed to “drive” the “traffic”, other than having a vague sense that there’s a lot of traffic on this or that platform, and that somehow you might be able to siphon some of that traffic off to your site.

The truth is a lot simpler than that. Forget about “driving traffic”, and recognize that you’re dealing with people. Real live human beings, just like you. That’s where inbound and content marketing come into the picture. Human beings respond to content, because it’s a way for you to share a glimpse of who you are and what you’re about, while teaching something valuable. That’s how you build a real relationship, and that’s why content creation in general, and good writing in particular, are so critical to succeeding with a blog-based business.

Now, a lot of bloggers actually do get that, but they miss the second thing…

The second thing is that the King can get awfully lonely. See, we’ve all been fed this myth about how things go viral online. I tell three friends, they each tell three friends, and those friends each tell three friends, and pretty soon my server crashes from all the traffic, right? Except that in real life, that’s not how it happens; I tell three friends, and of those friends, one doesn’t listen, the second one isn’t all that impressed, and the third one mentions it to one friend who does nothing.

The network model for things to go viral can still work, but it’s a lot harder than people like to pretend, and it depends on a certain critical mass that most blogs just don’t have. Which means that if you want to build awareness and exposure, you can’t count on the traffic coming to you; you need to put your content where people are already going, and that usually means guest posting on other, bigger blogs.

So in a nutshell, that’s what people are missing: good content, and a guest posting strategy.

Continue Blogging Your Way to Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales with Danny Iny

Win Friends and Influence People – Advice to Grow Your Blog Business with Twitter

by Brandon on September 28, 2011 · 56 comments

This is a guest post by Brandon Yanofsky.

When you first heard about Twitter, what was your reaction to this absurdly named website?

I literally laughed at it. Who’d spend all day writing 140 character status updates? Sounded ludicrous.

Flash forward 3 years, and it is now the key to my blogging success. Since I started using Twitter, I’ve seen my blog traffic increase nearly tenfold, and have begun making an income with my blog.

This article will show you the main technique I used to start and grow my blogging business with Twitter. My hope is that you’ll adapt this technique to meet your own business goals for your blog.

My technique can be broken down into two steps. Borrowing from Dale Carnegie, I’ve decided to call them Win Friends and Influence People.

Step 1: Win Friends – Find and Friend People with Similar Interests

A Brief History of Communication

There used to be a time when your entire social network consisted of only the people in your village. You were born, lived, and died in that village. You had no contact with any outsiders.

Then, man began creating new forms of communication. The invention of writing and a mailing system allowed us to communicate with those outside our own village. The printing press allowed an individual to mass produce his thoughts. Telephones allowed us to communicate instantly. Television allowed instantaneous distribution of thought to an entire nation.

Yet, even with all these advances, only those with financial backing were able to communicate their thoughts.

Until the Internet came along and broke down these barriers. Now, someone with almost no technical knowledge and no financial capital has the ability to broadcast any and every thought to the entire world.

Continue Win Friends and Influence People – Advice to Grow Your Blog Business with Twitter

Post Case Study: Triberr Visits vs. Google Analytics

by Kristi Hines on September 12, 2011 · 50 comments

One of the more interesting, maybe even downright controversial aspects of social media is actually measuring results. How have your strategies actually helped your website? While businesses focus on the ROI in dollars, bloggers focus on the ROI in traffic.

This morning, when I popped onto HootSuite, I saw this tweet from Brankica of How to Blog Like a Star.

Triberr Traffic Tweet

Naturally, being the statistics geek that I am, I wondered if I could match up the stats that Triberr gives you for visits from everyone’s unique Triberr URL of your post to the number of visits you see in Google Analytics.

Continue Post Case Study: Triberr Visits vs. Google Analytics

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