The Art of Digital Advertising: How to Market a Blog and Gain Killer Traffic
Building a blog takes effort. It takes time and passion and dedication. And there’s nothing worse than getting no hits after putting in all that hard work.
Most new bloggers learn fairly quickly that getting their site in front of people, let alone the right people, also takes time. With more than 70 million new blog posts published through WordPress every day, it may seem impossible to ever build an audience.
Don’t fret! That number seems scary until you realize that over 400 million people view 21+ billion blog pages every month. If you want to make money from your blog, you need to learn how to promote your blog and get your own views.
One avenue you may not have considered yet is pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Read on for this brief introduction to PPC, why it works, and how to market a blog with PPC.
Types of PPC Marketing for Blog Promotion
PPC marketing refers to the method of promoting a blog or website by paying for advertisements through a platform. Every time someone clicks the advert and gets directed to your site, the PPC platform charges a fee. It may cost $2 for that click, but the click could result in a new subscriber or a big sale.
When marketing professionals talk about PPC, they usually refer to one of two kinds of PPC: social media and search.
Social Media PPC
Many social media networks now offer PPC marketing through their platforms. Most of them offer at least some kind of advertising, but the following have PPC:
You may also use PPC advertising on YouTube through Google Adwords.
Search PPC
Most people think of search PPC when they hear pay-per-click advertising. These ads appear on search engine results pages as “promoted” results. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all offer their own versions of PPC specific to their platform.
Advantages of Using PPC to Promote Your Blogs
Using PPC to promote your blogs can turn those zero views into hundreds or thousands within a short period of time. PPC offers many advantages to old and new blogs alike, including:
Partnership with Analytics
Most PPC platforms, like Google and Yahoo, also offer analytics. Knowing what marketing efforts worked and what didn’t pose a challenge in the past. Using analytics alongside your PPC campaign exposes the strategies generating the most return on investment (ROI).
This helps you to stop spending money on marketing tactics that don’t attract your target audience. You can then focus your funds on expanding the ones that generate more traffic. You can also automate Adwords management with scripts to make it even easier.
Massive Reach
Do not underestimate the massive reach of PPC. Both social media PPC and search PPC put your blog in front of big audiences. Millions of people use social media every day without thinking twice about it. It has become as normal as breathing.
Google searches occur even more frequently with an average of 40,000 searches occurring every second. Appearing in front of your audience within these billions of search queries happens more often with the help of PPC.
Customizable Targeting Options
Not only does PPC advertising get you in front of people. It gets you in front of the RIGHT people. This makes all the difference when learning how to market a blog.
The customizable targeting options allow you to play around with settings until you find your ideal target audience. Change your parameters based on many factors from the placement of the ad or targeted age group to geographical data and consumer interests. The more narrow your target audience, the higher your ROI.
Huge Return on Investment
A high ROI should always drive your digital marketing campaign. PPC proves time and time again to be worth the investment.
For every $1 spent on Google PPC advertising, you average $8 returned. PPC ads help you make more money from your blog.
How to Market a Blog with PPC
When first learning how to promote a blog using PPC, you must keep a few general tips in mind to succeed. Follow the five tips below to put your blog in the best position to gain more traffic and make more money.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Trying to make your blog appeal to everyone often results in no one liking it at all. Choosing a niche and owning it helps you build a stronger audience base of readers who truly care about your blog.
Pay attention to the types of people who find themselves on your blog and stick around. The custom audience targeting options offered by your PPC platform become more useful when you do. Once you know your target audience, you can narrow down where the platform displays your PPC advert based on age, interests, salary range, gender, and more.
2. Perform Keyword Research
The most important part of any online marketing campaign, you must perform keyword research for both social media and search PPC. Knowing your target audience will only get you so far. You also need to know what terms they use when searching for your type of blog.
Keyword research identifies the very specific terms that your target audience uses. It also shows you the competitiveness of each keyword. The bidding process of PPC advertising and how much you pay for a click directly relate to the keyword’s popularity, so take the time to find the keywords with the highest ROI.
3. Write an Eye-Catching Ad
Paying for someone to click on your ad does not work if no one clicks on the advertisement. You need to write an eye-catching ad that encourages your target audience to click.
Think about what your blog offers or what problems it will solve. You can always include a special offer to attract attention. Just be sure your call-to-action (CTA) makes people want to click.
4. Create a Killer Landing Page
A killer landing page can make the difference between that paid click leading to a subscription or sale versus bouncing off. Sending the user to a landing page rather than your homepage helps you achieve your goals faster.
Be sure the landing page delivers on the promise made in the advertisement. It also needs to include another CTA to encourage the action you want the user to take.
5. Monitor and Adjust Based on Analytics
Continually monitor the analytics reports from your PPC platform. The longer time you spend running a campaign the more data you collect and the better you understand if it works or not.
Make small changes, review the analytics again, and record how they affect your strategy. Playing around a bit until you find out the perfect digital advertising campaign for your blog will yield you better traffic in the long term.
Making Money with a New Blog
Once you understand how to market a blog online with PPC, driving more traffic to your site becomes second nature. PPC advertising gets the ball rolling for new blogs and revitalizes established ones.
Just starting your first blog? Don’t miss out on my comprehensive blog resources and a step-by-step guide to starting a profitable blog. You too can be a Blog Ninja!
