Whether you had intentions of running your blog as a business, have a blog for your actual brick-and-mortar business or just have a window or voice for yourself, your blog would shine through and be its best if potrayed as a brand. However, not everyone is capable of building a brand — only marketing leaders can do that.

Surprisingly, not everyone can be a marketing leader — no, not even those guys who have “marketing” degrees or MBA or even those who seemingly worked in some random marketing department.I hold a marketing degree from Ohio University, Athens and I worked for a long time in marketing departments ( starting with sales) and I know probably know this first-hand.

The question is, can you be an effective marketing  leader?

Before we answer that, let’s ask — Why be a marketing leader? Isn’t being a blogger enough?

Nah…It’s not enough.

Why?

Because, your blog needs to cajole, persuade, convince, inform, educate, humor, pitch and sell( if needed) — being nice won’t work; being authoritative won’t work. Just being a good marketer would work.

How do I become a Blogger-cum-marketer?

Technically speaking, you are already wearing the running shoes; you are a marketer the moment you started your blog. It’s just that you got to accept the fact that marketing is a must and that your blog is the huge megaphone you are holding currently. You got to speak through your blog.

Create a personality; bring in that voice again and again until your readers know its you talking — this helps them remember the brand. Get those colors, logos, design, content and the layout speak the same language — the language of your brand.

All of these elemetns will work together to make your brand a reality. Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A’brand’ is a simple promise you make to your reader that she would only read what she has always been reading; that the colours will tune-in, the design and content shall flow; the blog itself will remain easy for her to navigate and finally, you will speak your heart out.

You see, your readers love you. Don’t take that love away from them.

Can a blogger be a marketing leader? You bet.

I wasn’t feeling well off late and that only meant that I wouldn’t get to stare at the computer for a long time. I wentback to some good ol’ reading and I happened to read up on E-Myth Revisited by Michael.E. Gerber. Whatever I could glean from the book is a little too much for this post or even a series of them; but I could discern something important for all of us out here : a whirring, superb, marketing strategy.

Why Should Your Blog Have a Marketing Strategy?

I was guessing this question might rear its head somewhere at the back of your mind. Your blog is a business ( at least that’s how it should be treated). If it has anything to do with brand building or revenues, it ought to have a plan to start with. No excuses, and nothing is just for ” looking good on the paper”. A wonderful way to get into this mindset is to catch up with some our previous posts on Building Blogs as a Business.

Ok, How the Heck Do I Market My Blog?

Your blog — with all its posts, guest writers, ghost writers, management team and back-end team — is a business in itself.  For now, you could be the only one wearing all the hats mentioned above. You need traffic to your blog and here’s how you should do it.

1. Have a way to generate content:

This one is fairly obvious but it isn’t done perfect. You all know the importance of great content and you also know the importance of consistency. So now, it boils down to two things — great focused content and consistency. Are you going to do it or are you going to let someone else do it? Or both? In either case, there has to be a plan in place. What is the frequency of your blog? When do you plan to post? When are the others in your team posting? Who is managing the blog and how?

• Post according to a set frequency and if you have more than one writers for your blog, all of these postings will be done according to that frequency.
• If you find too many blog posts jumping over each other on a single day, it isn’t much of a problem. However, if you may wish to add the extra posts on days your posting plan doesn’t cover. For instance, bloggingelements has a frequency of posting 3 times a week — every Monday,  Wednesday and Friday. Any extra blog posts find themselves posted on Saturdays, Sundays and any of the remaining days of the week except the three main days.

2. Have experts refurbish your content into other forms of media: You or your team of bloggers would obviously come up with great posts on the subject of your niche. You ( or you may have a team) must be able to bring this content out into other  forms of media — like podcats, videos and tutorials. Not only that, you will need to re-write the blog posts in the form of articles with amazing titles so as to be able to help you with your marketing efforts.

• Each blog post can be re-written into 4 articles ( none of which must be directly copied off each other or off the original).
• Each of these 4 articles can then be posted to ezinearticles, affsphere, ideamarketers,  and Bukisa. ( you may pick your choice of article directories, of course; these are my choices). All of these articles must link back to the original blog post on your blog.

3. Reach out and utilize other vehicles to market your blog: As mentioned above, posts rich in text will not be the only form of output your blog will have. It is bound to have video and audio too which can then be uploaded to youtube and countless other sites that can help you in getting backlinks, traffic and needless to mention, dedicated readership. You may even want to start a radio broadcast using talkshoe or blogtalkradio.

4. Rinse and Repeat: While you carry out your marketing plan, you may find that some of the tips might work for you and some might not. You got to keep those that work and discard that don’t. With regard to those that do, you got to keep doing just that and see if you can find more ways.

Do you have any bright ideas for better marketing of your blog? More resources you can tap into?

Affiliate marketing, I am sure you know, is nothing but the entire process of preparing to sell other people’s products. However, not many people get it right simply because most people either don’t have the motivation to get started and even if they do, they don’t really know how to do it. Assuming someone did manage to get started, they wouldn’t know how to write persuasive, effective articles or posts that can convince and close sales. Bloggers then, if you look carefully, are right there at the most wanted category for affiliate marketers.

Bloggers can be great affiliate marketers because:

1. Bloggers can be persuasive: Some bloggers can be really convincing in whatever-it-is-that-they-blog-about and that is a primary requirement for affiliate marketing. To be a successful affiliate, you got to be able to inform, persuade and sell. Bloggers bring with them a consummate skill in moving the masses with their words; they have the ability to bring about a change, what then is the mere act of recommending someone else’s product?
2. Many bloggers, if not all of them, blog for money: Let’s admit it, most bloggers out there set out blogging for money in the first place. As Mike found out in his previous post titled ” Why Don’t You Have A Blog“, there are roughly more than a million bloggers blogging for money alone. I know that there are plenty of others who are blogging for money too, it’s just that they don’t like to admit it. For a blogger to be an affiliate marketer then, what else can be a better motivating factor than money. The fact most bloggers do love blogging comes as a feather in the cap.

So bloggers hear: pick a niche up, start blogging at your very best and start doing some affiliate marketing. What do you think?

Email marketing has been around since the start of the web.  It is a form of communication we are seeing more bloggers begin to use as part of their everyday operations.  Email marketing is simply sending out a monthly newsletter for the purpose of promoting your blog’s products and services. When it comes to email marketing, there is one company that a lot of the top bloggers and the best marketers are using.  It’s what we here at Blogging Elements use and highly recommend: Aweber.com.  They have a great system, and best of all, the set-up is easy!  You will be able to quickly create and run your campaigns and have easy-to-use email marketing tools.  They offer everything in one place to get your first email campaign off the ground; and if you’re a seasoned marketer who wants to get into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, Aweber.com is still your place.  They also offer excellent activity-based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing.  Aweber has  just what you need to get your blog or company’s email marketing campaigns up and running.

Get started today by clicking here: Aweber

If you already use Aweber or another email marketing system, please leave a comment telling us what you like and what you don’t!