– Original date: 2015-06-07
– Labels: Blogging

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If you’ve read my post, How To Start A Blog, then chances are you are here because you want to know how to market that blog you just started. I can help you with that because this is exactly what I’ve done.

To recap, you’ve picked out a name for yourself and you’ve registered your domain (hopefully with GoDaddy, they are the best). Then you’ve started blogging somewhere like blogger or wordpress and you’ve fancied it up with an awesome blog design that you either did your self (DIY FTW) or paid for someone amazing to do it. Now, we go back to the number one thing; Content is King!

You’re going to need a few blog posts before you can market your blog. It’s the whole reason people come to your blog! This means that I need you to write every day for two weeks when you initially start. That’s 14 posts for you to market. If you don’t have any idea on what you could write about try these:

1. Introduction Post – this should always be your first post. 1 paragraph about you, 1 paragraph about the blog and why you’re writing. Boom! Done.
2. A to Z post – Pick a topic like music, beauty products, travel destinations, ect.
3. Hometown Tour – Give us a photo guided tour by you of your home town
4. Product Reviews – review something, anything. Buy new lipstick? Read a new book? Give it a star rating and let everyone know why they should or shouldn’t go out and get it right now.
5. Tutorial – ARE YOU GOOD AT SOMETHING? Tell us how to be amazing just like you.
6. Flashback Friday / Throwback Thursday – Post 10 pictures from your past and/or childhood.
7. Interview – Interview your mom, interview your dog, interview a random stranger on the street. Ask them 5 to 10 questions and put it up on the blog! I played a game of MASH with my mom and it was hilarious.
8. Lists – Make a list of things you’d never do. Make a list of 15 things you like & then the next day make a list of 15 things you dislike. 
9. Look at what is trending on google – make a blog post about one of those topics
10. Collections – do you collect anything? I collect rocks – make a post, show everyone your collection.
11. Current Event – Is something happening in your area? Is there some issue you want to write an opinion on? Don’t step on toes, but let your voice be heard. It is, after all, your blog!
12. Inspiration – are there blogs you love? People you admire on IG, funny people on Twitter/Facebook? Someone you just keep Pinning? Make a post about the 3 to 5 people you love on the web from every platform.
13. Link Love – Find three blog posts you loved, 5 items you want from Etsy, 3 pins you want to try, ect. Make a post spreading the good word!
14. Currently – Let us know what you’re up to, what you’re in to and now that we know a bit about you we actually might care about what you’re currently doing. 

Take note of how my posts look. There is a reason why my posts look the way they do. If you read my post, 5 Things Working For A Media Company Taught Me, you’ll read about my enlightening experience with formatting. You need three sentences, your hook + a graphic. Include links to your content in your content, white space and nice graphics. Make everything uniform; all photo’s need to be the same quality and size, use bullet points or numbers for lists, break up long paragraphs, use captions with photo’s when necessary and insert graphics or quotes if you can. See how I put “Keystones…”? I did that to break up text. I used the numbers and bullets to break up what would have otherwise been long text. Everything is important, make your blog look like something you’d find in a magazine and you’ll be golden.
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Now that you’ve got the content, time to move it. If you didn’t buy my Blogging Kit you’re going to need to make your Marketing Worksheet yourself. My worksheet keeps track of 13 tasks to do every single day of the week. When I give a number here I want you to know this is the BARE MINIMUM. You need to be doing at least this, doing more is fine but this is the minimum needed to actually get some readers and not over work yourself if you’ve got, like, you know, a day job.
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1. Comment on five different blog’s a day.  You can use Passion Fruit’s Marketplace to find new blogs. Try and get to as many of those blogs as possible. Taylor your comments to the post, don’t just write “love your blog” on every single blog. That’s not productive. Three sentences, get out three complete sentences about the post and always sign it with your blog URL unless the commenting system forbids it.
2. You want to tweet out your blog post for the day; once in the morning and once in the evening. Use two different tweets. AM post: “New on the blog today [BLOG TITLE] + [LINK]” PM post: “In case you missed it [BLOG TITLE] + [LINK]” Try and be more creative than that, truly. But those are some starter tweets I guess since you’ve only got 140 chars.
3. Post AM & PM posts on Facebook as well. You can get a little more lengthy and summarize your post since you’re not under a restricted number of chars.
4. Retweet or tweet out other bloggers posts that are in a similar vein as yours, tagging them always to hopefully start a dialogue with them. The goal is 80% other or “curated” content and 20% your content.
5. E-mail companies when you use their products and see if they will share your post on social media, be sure to include the link and your information. Also, be professional. Don’t just write “I used your shit” and send off an e-mail. That won’t do you any good. State your name, your blog, gush about their product a little, tell them you wrote a blog post, you will be sharing it to social media on these platforms, you’d be flattered if they’d take a look at your blog, retweet your tweet, post a link on their Facebook, mention your blog in some way or keep you in mind for promotions and then sign off with your first and last name, blog name and url under your name and links to social media accounts. In fact, if you don’t have all that as a signature in your e-mails anyways DO IT NOW.  If they don’t or you don’t hear a response that’s fine but just reaching out is good practice. 
6. Make a graphic for instagram that looks similar to or is in the actual post and post that ONCE. Use bit.ly to put the link to your blog post in your IG profile and in the comments make sure you tell your readers to click the link in your profile to read the post. 
7. Pin an image from your post to a Pinterest board, specifically for your blog. 
8. Share your post to Google + 
9. If you’ve got a network like Blogher, SITS, IFB,Clever Network, ect make sure you’re putting that out there on those services too.

I told you I use automated services in the previous post to help me. You need to be using them or at least something like them. I write up two or three blog posts and keep them as drafts, I even research “writing prompts” for blog ideas because posts don’t always come to me. You need to be consistent. If you blog 2-3 times a week in the beginning, you need to blog 2 or 3 times a week EVERY single week.  I blog 2 times a week as a rule. If I blog more than that, fine, but at least twice a week and usually on Tuesdays and Friday’s. My previous blog I had two weekly series, Make Up Monday and Wendesday Want list and then any additional blogging was done on Friday. It gave me a day in between to work on content for the next day if I needed to and it gave me time to market the last piece before the next one went up and so basically I was working every single day either creating or marketing content. I got burnt out. So I promised myself not to do that this time. Stick to making content on my weekend off and automating a lot of my promotion, which I also generate on the weekend. My day job is working 12 hours 3 days a week, which gives me ample time to have this as a side job. It is working for now.

You need to have blog goals and they need to be realistic. For me, my blog goals are simple and can be defined in one word: GROW! Everyone measures success in different ways, based on what is important to us. If I’m not growing, I’m not being successful. My growth may be 20 new followers on Twitter or 2 followers on bloglovin but that’s growth and for me that works.

My blog goals in the beginning were just to get readers. I wanted to be able to hold a contest, I wanted to be able to do things with affiliates and earn money to travel. So I looked at what needed the most help; Instagram and Bloglovin. I had 1 RSS follower, 19 bloglovin followers and 89 followers on Instagram and 27 Facebook Page likes my first month. By 6 months I wanted it to be at least 500 across the board. From there I wanted to grow 50 followers on each platform each month and just keep growing. Baby steps, figure out what works and what doesn’t. Everything above is what I did and you can look at my social media accounts and see that I did well.

On top of me running around like a mad woman trying to get followers/readers the free way I did three other things:

1. Bought business cards and networked the old fashioned way.
2. Paid for Advertising on websites via Passion Fruit’s Marketplace. 
• If you purchase my Blogging Kit, there is a worksheet for tracking your ads so you know who to renew with and when it is time to purchase ad space with someone new!
3. Ran and Joined in with Contests.

These things helped me achieve my goals by my 6 month mark. As I went along I developed a media kit, which is what I will be showing you in the next blog post!

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