5 HIDDEN Ways To Make YOUR Blog Get Real Attention [Real Cases]

Welcome back to our series on how to become a star blogger. This time we will take a closer look at how you can market your blog - did you miss to read the first part on how to start a blog you can find the post on my profile

Let's get started by looking at how to get more readers!

1.Tracking and analysis

Without sounding too technical - tracking and analyzing your traffic is a very important card to play, especially if you want to make a living from blogging. I always say that if you fail to analyze and track everything you do online is like driving a car blindfolded. 

Google Analytics

We fortunately live in a time where technology has made it much easier for us to track data. In particular, Google has made a huge effort so that we can get as much data from our sites as possible.

Google Analytics is a free data tool all websites in the world are able to install. After installation you'll be able to login to your dashboard where you can access a variety of data about your website.

Installation

Do you have a WordPress blog? It's very easy to install Google Analytics. Start by creating a user account. Once you have created an account, you can create a new website - then press the "Get tracking ID".

Simply insert this tracking code directly in your website code. If you do not quite know how to do it, you can find help. Or you can simply Google "How to install Wordpress" - I can not describe it easier than this guide, so spend a few minutes to learn how to do it.

Once you have installed the code correctly, you will after a short time be able to see the numbers when logging in (Given that you have traffic on your site of course). 

Screenshot of Google Analytics on Sarahposin.com

As you can see on the left menu there are quite some menus to look into. Not everything is equal important, but I will try to highlight the most relevant data you need to look at, if you're running a blog.

• Time on site - How much time do people spend on your site?
• Traffic Sources - Where does your users come from?
• Bounce rate - How much of your users slips after reading only one post?
• New or old users? - Are you good enough to keep your readers engaged?

There are a myriad of things you can track in Google Analytics, so it might be a confusing to know which elements that are most important. My recommendation is to set up some standard KPIs that you are working towards. (KPI = Key Performance Indicator). 

Now you may wonder if you're only able to track visitor behavior and site-related data through Google Analytics. Unfortunately Facebook and Google for instance are competing with each other, so it's not always easy to combine the two medias, as several other medias. 

The good news is that there are software tools out there which can pull data in, from a variety of medias so you can get a better view of the entire company performance.

Cyfe

Let me present to you: Cyfe! The ultimate KPI tool for startups and for bloggers. There are alternatives, but Cyfe is a perfect fit for my purpose. The pricing is also very reasonable. Cyfe is a very easy-to-use tool which are able to simplify data from multiple sources, and then show them in a very nice dashboard overview.

You decide which metrics or goals that are most important to you, which also makes your team or just yourself, have clear goals to work towards.

Let us take the example of SlikhaarTV's cyfe dashboard.

1. Social board

Since SlikhaarTV is a social brand, the main KPIs are all social data. That may be Facebook likes, YouTube subscribers, Twitter Followers or Instagram followers. We have in other words created a board which embraces the most important KPI's - it also means that we've cut away non-essential data - I promise you: This create focus! 

Where Focus Goes – Energy Flows!

2. E-commerce board

We all need to eat right? Slikhaar's second most important business is to sell products. The webshop is the money-driving factor which helps to push harder on the social board due to investments and employees. So we've also created an e-commerce board that includes sales and conversion rates, so we're constantly able to see what our changes might bring. 

3. Traffic board 

The last element we wanna track is traffic. We constantly work to improve the content-related part of Slikhaar's concept, such as exploring other channels than social medias. We use the traffic board to track all visitor related data to our website - very useful when you're running a blog for instance. 

Cyfe works by creating the widgets on the boards you want. A board is the parent, and can be named like above - "Social board". Then it will include all the social data we want to track. Next is to add a widget - it could be "Facebook" - and then you can choose which data from Facebook you would like to track.

#Tip: Are you serious about your blog, I suggest you stay away from the small counters which count every click on your website, these counters does not give a great overview, due to you can manipulate them very easily. Google Analytics is the way to go! 

2. Guest Blogging

A very underrated strategy in blogging, at least in Europe. The strategy is highly recognized abroad. In its simplicity, it works when you write posts for other bloggers, and get a bite of their readers. Of course you have to be very serious above one thing - Your content - but if you are serious about your content, there are many blogs that would like to share it for you. They get content for their audience, and you get branding. A so-called WIN / WIN. 

A good example of this is when Neil Patel, one of the marketing pioneers, chooses to write for Entrepreneur.com, Neil already has a strong brand, but articles from Entrepreneur.com & Forbes makes his brand even stronger, and people are looking for his content on other channels as well, and will eventually end up on Neil's own channels.

The Google method

Lets say you're a personal coach or trainer, and want to write for other medias to increase your awareness. 

Examples might be:

• "Training" + "guest blog" or "write for us"
• "Supplements" + "guest blog" or "write for us"
• "Health" + "guest blog" or "write for us"
• "Marketing + guest blog" or "write for us"
• "Recipes + guest blog" or "write for us"

This method should make it possible for you to gather at least a dozen of websites interested in your content. Note them in your Wunderlist as we discussed in the first part of this blog series, otherwise you can also use excel if you want to make a systematic overview.

#Tip: In the beginning of your blogging career I recommend writing even more blogposts for other blogs than you do for your own, because it will make it more easy to grow an audience. 

Write extraordinary good posts!

Imagine that you're speaking in front of 10,000 potential new customers - that's what you are actually doing when you write a guest post on another site -  That's why should your post should be top quality.

To write the best blog post possible, here goes a few tools for you!

Start by jumping into Buzzsumo and enter the URL from one of the market leaders in your industry. As a n example I just entered Entrepreneur.com - and then I will see the most shared articles from their site. Do the same for 4-5 competitors in your industry and note them all down in a excel document. 

I didn't loose you there did I? - These results will make it way easier for you to find subjects. - You'll now have 20-30 articles (depending on the number of competitors you have analyzed) which perform well on these pages - I wonder if you can find a subject from these? You should be able to! 

When guest blogging remember these elements:

• Always write with quality in mind, and think about your audience.
• Link to your own blog one time, and link out to good ressources if you're allowed to by the media. 
• Ask if its possible to get your own author box in bottom every blog post. 
• If you write about a particular topic, remember references. It's okay to have your own opinion, but if it's backed with data, people will be more likely to trust you and be open for a discussion. 

3. Growth Hack other audiences

The Growth hacking term is a very popular term these days. From my perspective it's just old water in new bottles. Growth Hacking is for me to have the creativity to create simple hacks which will allow your company to grow faster than you'll be able to do with traditionel marketing. 

Growth Hacking is simplicity combined with creativity

Let us come down to earth again ... How can I use it for my blog?

When it comes to blogging, Growth Hacking is very simple: You have to steal your audience from elsewhere. It's very similar to the guestblogging stuff we talked about before, but here goes a few more options to quick-grow your audience. 

• Social media - when you reach a certain number of followers you will be able to reach out to other social medias and create shoutouts between your accounts. Once again quality is the most important factor because, if you create great content even the biggest accounts will share your content. 
• Have a competition with a sponsor and ask them to share your competition on their page to steal some of their audience. It's very easy to combine your media with brands if you recommend their products etc. 
• Interview known bloggers, customers or celebrities and do it so well that they share the post on their social media. You might get the chance to interview a famous model, or some of your clients in your industry, and then you get them to share your content - suddenly your servers will crash because of all the new traffic you gain. 

I think you got the point by now right?

By taking advantage of these methods you will be able to grow very fast. I've done it with several companies, and some of the larger corporations use these tactics as well. Spotify used Facebook to get a lot of listeners, AirBnB used Craigslist, Apple made white headphones, Dropbox returned 2 GB free if you refer friends. 

The list of creative examples is long - so it's up to you to create the next example! 

Remember that when a Growth Hack is done one time, it will be difficult to repeat because it has already been used, or because there is now a market leader / first-mover.

4. Facebook advertising

I discovered Facebook advertising 5 years ago, and was lucky to bump into Hans Tosti and Mikael Lemberg as they worked for Komfo back in the days. Being around these guys helped me a lot to gain the knowledge I've today and they sort of gave me the energy to keep on learning this very powerful advertising system. 

This does not mean that you can not use Facebook advertising - in fact, their ad tool has become so easy and simple to use that everyone actually can take advantage of it. I'm currently building the ultimative guide to Facebook advertising, but I will share some secrets today! So keep on reading. 

Have  your audience ind mind

The biggest mistake most people are doing on Facebook is to use the so-called boost button, and just hope that something magical happens. This is not how to do it - if you want to get success on Facebook you will have to dig deeper than just hitting the blue button - this is not the Matrix!

Building ads

When you build ads in Facebook, you should always use your Power Editor. Power Editor is Facebook's response to an ad dashboard that allows you to create more advanced ads, and more in-depth audiences.

Overall goals (Campaign)

Without getting too technical, you need a clear division of your ads. Above you can see how I recommend that your ads are structured. I would always recommend choosing a target which can be traced - post engagement, I think itself is too broad, unless you run a timeline competition, then it might be an okay strategy.

#Tip: My strategy is always to create good content, then make some narrow and quality minded audiences and promote my content to this audience. While promoting the ads to my audiences I'm focusing on building my email list, and focusing on getting my sales through that channel instead of pushing on social medias. 

It works!

Audiences (Ad-sets)

• Visits

To market to your visitors basically means that you place a tracking pixel on your website. Facebook then creates what is called a Website Custom Audience - which means that Facebook compares your visitors with their Facebook data and from that make an audience.

As this audience is already interested in your content, it may be the most efficient target group to run ads towards - but only if you have more than 1000+ visitors a month, otherwise the group will quickly be exhausted. 

• Fans

Your fans have already indicated that they like you. So this audience is also very likely to perform well. However, you must remember to exclude the other audiences to make sure you don't have any duplicated audiences. 

• Email list

If you have an email list of users who are either enrolled in your newsletter or have shopped at your store, you can upload this list in Facebook custom audiences. Again a very powerfull tool as these users are directly in your buy-zone.

• Look-a-like audiences

Another audience that may be relevant, is called Look-a-like. When you have traffic, fans or members of your newsletter, so you can ask Facebook to find 1% or 10% similar to these. It means Facebook will create a new audience similar to your existing audience. We used this tactic to get Peter Bendtsen's page over 10,000 likes on Facebook.

It works simply by in your audiences press the "look-a-like" audiences, then you can select the source as to make the audience from.

Simple but effective.

• Ads (Ads)

The final element is ads. Good ads are simple and have a clear CTA. If you market to your readers, you can for example write "Thank you for reading, be sure to drop by our Facebook page and stay updated - and of course you'll need a very clear picture so people can see who you are. 

Example from Sarah Posin to people who have visited the page

If you market to people who do not know your brand, you need to play on emotion or interest. It could be punchlines such as "Are you also tired of the mess in the economy? Do as 20,000 others and become part of ....." Or "Why will no one hire me? 5 tips for job search" 

You get the point ...

The most important thing is your creativity. Once you have defined the target groups you can create as many ads as you like. This means that you can create 20 ads and then let Facebook test them out against each other. Give them a week's time - I often have 10 ads running at a time in major campaigns.

Example from Sarahposin towards non-fans

Once you have built a good core database of visitors to your website and increased the amount of fans, I recommend that you do not try to get more likes, but use your marketing budget to get more clicks to your website - using your most popular posts and set them up as an ad - run them in a short period of time and see if it makes a lot of traffic. ALWAYS remember to build your email list, because it's a "free" tool to get sales later on. 

5. Google and search engines

A very underrated factor most websites overlook, is Google. Unfortunately, people forget that we tend to search for everything, so if you pay attention to Google  you will also be able to get a lot of traffic from the big Search Engine. 

I was lucky to bump into Henrik Bondtofte of one Denmark's enough talented SEO consultants about 5-6 years ago, and despite only briefly collaboration I learned a lot and got my introduction to how search engines work.

Search engine optimization basically means that you optimize your content / website to rank higher in Google. Additionally, you can choose the "illegal" tactics which are also called "blackhat", or the legal tactics called "whitehat" - roughly speaking - there are, of course, roads in between. 

Lets keep it simple for now ...

Today it has become much harder to optimize for Google than it has been, so it also requires much more of website owners than it did 5-8 years ago, also because the competition is much greater. So think users and not Google! :)

Get started with these tips!

• Make sure your site is mobile friendly, Google stated not so long ago that in future you will gain points in the algorithm if your site is useable on mobile devices. So if your website is not, you can start today by doing so!
• Make sure that your site is quick to load! Not just for Google's, but especially for your user's sake, there's nothing worse than than a slow website, I'm sure you agree. 
• Write your own content! - Do not be a copy cat. The Internet does not need more content - but quality! Write stunning good content, and it will be linked to. My good friends from Sorry Mom used this tactic when they made their new blog about Tattoos. Instead of writing boring blog posts, they chose to blog about the best tattoos made of the best tattoo artists in the world. Already on the first day was their posts shared by a huge Macedonian news media which resulted in a new traffic record and a couple of pretty good quality links.

A sneak peak of their traffic growth - Sorry Mom

• Get links the natural way - somewhat like I wrote above about Sorry Mom, and also when you guest blog that you also have the option to link to your blog, but do not get 1,000 Indian links - they do not work, or perhaps they will briefly, and then you will see your site disappear from Google :-)
• Link internally between your articles, and to other articles too - give the user a lot of other good sources of relevant information. It supports both your content and simultaneously provides the user the opportunity to immerse themselves into the subject and read relevant articles.
• Put yourself into what title tags and meta descriptions are, and optimize them - and use your data to continually optimize these.
• Search engine optimization takes time, it's all about patience and constant improvement of your site and content. If you do well, you will already within 6-12 months could see a good increase of your organic results through Analytics. Depending on the size of your site, there may be much to be gained from the technical aspect, but when you start a blog, there is no need to focus too much on it as long as your site is indexed by Search Engines. 

# Bonus tip: Be unruly good at what you do

Before I started my blog, there were many who asked me all sorts of things, so I knew there was a need for the things I do, maybe I am better to simplify them, or I can tell the examples that are very actionable. That's why I want to spend 8-10 hours writing these posts. 

Be unruly good at what you do.

I had a brief dialogue with  Casper Jespersen one of the most recognized personal trainers in Denmark before I wrote this post where I said I would mention his blog. He laughed a bit of me and said, "Well we' haven't updated the layout in two years" - now Casper nevertheless get his laugh again! Casper's blog has repeatedly been bookmarked with me because of one thing - content.

(Casper just got a link from this post because of this content and skills)

Casper has a voice, facing the audience he has and the business he has - personal training. He is for me and others - a professional source of information, I know I can trust what he writes, and that is the basis of the information I read, of course you can agree or disagree, but as long as there is references I have certainly gotten a researched article.

Without comparing Elon Musk with others: If Elon Musk started his PRIVATE blog and started writing about future energy options, how confident are you that the blog gets huge success? 100% - not only because Elon's celebrity status, but also because he is uncontrollable good at what he does.

Do you know someone who deserves a share because they are spectacular good, maybe yourself? Please leave a comment below with link - I'm already looking forward to dig into their universe. 

In the next post we will look at how you write the best blog post possible, how to find the best subjects and how to build the best layout.

I am already looking forward to read them! 

Remember as always: A like, or comment makes me happy, It's that easy to make me happy! :) Enjoy your day, and thank you for your time!