You have created content that is very useful, helpful and contains product promotions as solutions to your niches problems.

What you need now is traffic reading and taking action.

How do you do that when your blog is only just started.

You need to practice the other side of what you have started – the marketing…

Blog marketing is a technique of increasing awareness of your content to your audience. It is another traffic method used when starting a blog to gain some visitors rather than waiting for organic traffic.

A lot of courses promote blogging as a method of affiliate marketing, and i agree that it is a good method. But most of these courses don’t emphasize or teach enough about the importance of marketing your blog or brand.

Let’s go through a few ways you can market your blog at the start of your journey, and into the future with most of these methods….

Basics of blog marketing

You had the idea – and it was buzzing around in your head, you had to get it out.

So you start a blog to help people.

You started your site, created a few how to’s , then you started finding products that can help your niche…

You create articles based around these products….

But there is something wrong….

You hear the wind whistling through your site….

But…but…the content is excellent …useful….optimised for search engines…..

Where are the visitors…..

This is where the second half of the affiliate marketing comes in …the marketing bit…

You need to try to cut through the general level of of noise out there on the internet.

You need to make people aware of your content.

As there are 4,508,000 blogs published daily  then you need to be actively promoting it.

There is too much information out there for yours to just be the one they find at the start of your journey, as your blog matures then ranking will take over, if the search engines think your content the most relevant.

So what are you going to do…

The easiest ones are social media marketing.

Then there is guest posting

And once you have started your list then email marketing…

 Social media marketing

How many times do you just check online at your social media account during the day.

There are tons of them to choose from twitter, instagram, facebook, pinterest and youtube ( yep that one is classed as a social media…)

Well you can find where your niche hangs out – if you don’t already know, and then place your content in front of them.

Using your niche hashtags you can create a few curiosity headlines and a short statement or two to be tweeted, changed into a post on facebook, adding in an image for pinterest.

And all of this is necessary to start to get peoples attention.

You will need to learn the best times to post your content on these platforms for the best return, so it is another area to learn.

Don’t overload yourself by choosing to use loads of different platforms , just choose one and learn to use it well, then if necessary move onto another one and go through the same process – while keeping up with the other…

Once you have started to be recognised and your recommendations acted on then you know you are starting to build your authority, always be driving traffic back to your site to build your viewing figures for google.

Getting to this stage you can start to reach out to other more authority blogs in your niche and think about creating articles for them or guest blogging…

Guest blogging

But that means i am creating articles for my competitors……

Yes that is true, but it is also true that they are exposing your article to their audience, with the risk of them jumping to your site….

But it normally is a mutual agreement that visitors to their site who are signed up will stay signed up and if they think the article good enough , go check out your site – so at this stage it had better be good enough to get them to signup for you as well.

For them it is another blog on their site they don’t have to create. For you it is a chance to impress their audience into looking over your site.

It also means that you are making a noise within your niche , enough to be recognised by those who you probably looked at at the start and thought ‘i will never be like them…’.

So create a good author bio to tempt them over to your site, and have it setup so almost the first thing they see is a hard to refuse offer, so they need to sign up.

Once signed up you have their email address and can start on the next level of marketing – where most marketers make most of their money ( ‘the money is in the list’).

Email marketing

Keeping in regular contact with people means they think about you.

This is the reason for all that signed up content landing in your inbox.

So once you are at this stage and have sorted out the bugs in your autoresponder, you will be starting to move into email marketing.

Sending out useful content to your list – along with relevant offers.

And knowing that this list is interested enough to not click on the unsubscribe button.

There are tools within most autoresponder to show the various stastitics of open rate, heat maps to show how your users interacted with your emails and the important click through reports.

Optimising the time of sending to your list can make a huge difference in open rates.

At this stage you are creating content less than 20% of the time and most of your time will be occupied with marketing.

So you will be hunting out the solutions, segmenting your lists, creating email campaigns – a completely different world to where you started….

Where to from here….

There will always be new content to write, which in turn means more opportunities to help your niche – so more email campaigns to create.

But at this stage a lot of your campaigns, signups, offers are all automated, so it has become more of the passive income you have dreamed of from the beginning.

Making money while you sleep.

It will have been a hard road, there will have been many times you wanted to quit…

But you didn’t, you kept battling through….

And now …..

You can start over again, with improved knowledge of what works…

A new venture that you always promised yourself you would do once you ‘made it’

The pressure is off, now it’s your turn to have more fun than the last one….

But there will always be more opportunities to market – new markets opening up – new methods being tried, some successful – others disappearing almost instantly.

And now you allow guest blogging on your site, you do traffic exchanges with other bloggers to extend you reach.

And you can smile and think back to those early days , those days when you thought ‘will I, can I – no…I will…’

And most of that success is down to marketing your content.

So once you have about 30 articles on your site – then start ramping up the marketing.

Before that, don’t forget to join forums and social media groups – helping out with questions.

Never lose sight of your dreams – and always try to do at least one thing for your business every day.