How to grow blog traffic using marketing automation

If you have been blogging for some time, you would have realized how difficult it is for you to gain new readers. Even though you might be highly active and posting new articles every single day, what if there’s no one to read it? It’s better to have a private blog rather than to have a blog with no readers at all. To get your content out to the masses, you need to market it – sell your content to the readers and gain their loyalty.

But marketing is not as easy as it sounds and requires a lot of hard work. Here’s where marketing automation tools and platforms come into play, effectively reducing the burden on you.

Why You Should Market Your Content

You might be asking me why you should promote your blog and wondering if you even need to market it. Well, the simple answer is yes. Yes, you need to market it but why? Marketing helps you put your blog in front of many eyeballs thereby helping you increase the readership. Once you have a loyal audience for you content, you can start promoting products and services to them and literally make money off your content and readers. There are so many affiliate programs out there which easily pay upwards of $50 for every product you help them sell.

By just helping them sell a dozen products a year, you can easily cover up for the money you spend on domain name registrations, web hosting, email marketing, license renewals, etc. In fact, if you are very good at it, you can make much more than that and you can easily quit your day job and become a full-time affiliate marketer.

What is Marketing Automation

So, what is marketing automation? It is nothing but the setting up of repetitive marketing actions across various platforms to run automatically a certain time frame everyday rather than having to do it individually every single time. This help you, as a content creator, by helping you focus more on creating things rather than marketing them. But the whole concept of automated marketing doesn’t stop there.

Inbound Marketing is the Key

Developing a proper strategy is very important. The end goal should be to attract the attention of potential customers and make them click-through your site and turn them into leads. There’s a term for this – inbound marketing. According to Wikipedia, inbound marketing is a technique used for drawing the attention of potential customers to products and services through various methods such as content marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization.

There are various ways through which you can manage your marketing automation campaigns and I will be sharing a few of them with you below.

Social Media Automation

Though having a strong online presence across various social media platforms is essential to get your posts in front of more eyeballs, managing every account individually is nearly impossible. If you spend your time sharing posts on every social media platform one after the next, it will gradually eat up your resources and you won’t have enough quality time to spend on your blog. Here’s where social media automation tools come to your rescue.

Using a good social media automation platform, you will be able to schedule and manage your posts across various social media channels directly from a single dashboard. This will also help you to be more responsive and you won’t miss out on the important notifications. Being constantly engaged with your new followers will turn them into loyal followers – they are like a sack of gold coins waiting to be picked up by you. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, Hiplay, IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer and CoSchedule to connect your blog with various social media channels and easily share posts across them within a few mouse clicks.

Opt-in Email Marketing

Who said email marketing is dead? Email marketing never died and will not go away any time in the near future – it is here to stay. For you email marketing automation campaigns to even work, you need to have a solid list of email followers for your blog. It is always better to have a good number of email followers as it will help you to get your content in front of people who will most likely check it out.

You can put up a ‘subscribe to blog’ widget just below your posts on the sidebar. Another option is to share a link to your email list among your social media followers.

Email Personalization

When you are sending out emails to your subscribers, make sure it is personalized – not generalized. There’s no use of sending irrelevant emails to your followers if they are not interested in it. Try to segment your followers and send only relevant emails to different groups depending on their interests. With the help of email automation tools, you can easily create custom logic and add subscribers to different lists depending on how you generated the lead.

Email automation tools helps you send relevant emails to your existing subscribers and boosts their engagement with your content. Nowadays, you can also track who opened your emails and clicked through to your content. Using this data, you can send a follow-up email to people who showed interest in your content to further boost your conversion rates. If you ignore these basic email personalization tips and keep sending generalized emails, all your emails will end up either in the trash or in the spam folder one fine day.

Use Feedly Effectively

Feedly is a cloud-based news aggregator application that can be effectively used to organize, read and share content which matters to you. In other words, it is a feed reader but it is much better than the ones already available out there. By adding your site to Feedly you will be able to get a wider exposure and people can easily subscribe to your blog without the need for another separate service. Feedly’s Chrome extension currently has more than 1,117,451 users and they also have an active user base on Android and iOS.

Users will automatically be notified of new content once you publish a new post. All you need to do is add your blog’s RSS feed URL to Feedly and add a Feedly button to your site. Moreover, Feedly users can directly share your content across various social media channels or save it to Buffer, Instapaper, Hootsuite and Pocket. By being active on Feedly, you can understand what’s trending right now and you can plan to create your content accordingly.

Conclusion

Thus I hope that you found this article useful in understanding how to use proper marketing automation strategies to grow your blog and bring a steady inflow of new visitors to your site. If you liked this post, I’m sure you will also appreciate my post on 6 ways to drive insane traffic to your website.