Hitesh Bhasin http://www.marketing91.com 3m 690 #marketing
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
The Difficulty of Blog Marketing
One of the most important steps in blogging, after content creation, is marketing of the blog. Blog Marketing involves both SEO and Social Media Marketing, however, if you notice although content creation is a bit easy, marketing the content, and coming on top in the search engines is becoming more and more difficult.
The content quality of many blogs have gone up. However, the same blogs find it tough to feature on the top 10 page of Google, or even find it tough to be socially shared. The inference is that marketing a blog is becoming more and more difficult. As per analysis, there are 4 major factors which are making the marketing of a blog tougher.
1) Google Panda and Google Penguin – Never before was backlink or content monitored so closely as today. It is as if Google has placed security guards monitoring your blog. And the content length too is under the scanner. Both of these phenomenon have been observed after the introduction of Google Panda and Google Penguin. Google panda monitors content while Google penguin monitors backlinks.
These are both quality barometers, and any blog which fails these tests, will not get too much traffic from search engines and risks de indexing from search engines as well. Thus, modification in search engines is making it difficult to create average backlinks or to create short content posts. In fact, you have to proceed WITH caution while creating posts or backlinks.
2) Competition – Just like your blog, other bloggers are marketing also. Thus, overall the effect is that, in a niche there might be 5 bloggers, and all of them are blogging vigorously. The dfferentiation in this case is created by the content and the quality of the content. To ward off competition, you have to regularly create content which users like to share and which gives ample information to your readers so that even search engines rank it above others.
Thus, to beat competition, lot of time has to be spent on good content creation. Another problem is saturation. Take time management or exercise for example. There are so many blogs covering the same topic, that you have to find a really unique angle to be anywhere near the top.
3) Cost – If you really want to differentiate your blog, then you have to use paid software. Any of your competitors who has a subscription to one of the many online marketing companies, has a fair advantage to be the top of your niche. There are many giants of SEO and internet marketing like MOZ, Scribe, Ahrefs, Raven tools and others who give a tremendous advantage to the competitors using them. Furthermore, if the traffic of your site rises, then you have to use premium cache plugins, CDN’s, high traffic servers and other such technology which subsequently increases the cost of running the blog.
4) The “Wow” factor – The marketing of a blog is even tougher because some bloggers, are naturally social in nature. These bloggers tend to use headlines and content which gets shared very easily. This is known as the WOW factor. Some bloggers are naturally endowed with it whereas others do not know the trick to get more social shares. Thus, these small things make a large difference in the marketing of a blog. The more the WOW factor in your blog, the more it will be shared. Social traffic is almost at par with search traffic nowadays.
Thus, because of the above 4 factors, marketing of a blog is becoming more and more difficult. You have to run various processes simultaneously, to ensure that your blog is at top. You have to create content, market the site, SEO the site and finally maintain the site from aspects of plagiarism, broken links etc. All of the steps above will give you a blog which is strong from the base up and has been marketed successfully in various niche’s so as to get the right traffic to your blog.
About the Author
Hitesh Bhasin is a blogger at Marketing91.com and writes in depth articles on marketing. His recent article was on the Marketing mix.
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