An effective blogging strategy is all about driving meaningful engagement between your brand and your target audience. You need to produce high-quality, compelling content that resonates with your target audience, disseminate that content efficiently and effectively, and cultivate a group of loyal content consumers that want to keep coming back for more.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. But the good news is that there are tools out there that can help to make the entire blogging process easier. Here are 20 great web services that will help you to run a better blog this year.
Market Research
Remember, the best bloggers out there know what kind of content will resonate with their target audience. They have an understanding of their target audience’s wants, needs, and preferences—and they are able to develop and tailor content accordingly. However in order to gain that understanding you must conduct market research. To gain improved insight into your target audience, be sure to check out the following services:
– BuzzSumo
When you are trying to figure out what type of content resonates most strongly with your target audience, Buzz Sumo is a truly invaluable tool. Basically, this resource helps you ascertain how specifically content performs online. You can compare performance by sorting pieces based on domain, keyword, or topic, based on a number of different metrics, including total shares on social media. This can help you more effectively develop content ideas that will appeal to your target audience. For example, if you enter your company’s domain name in the BuzzSumo trending tab, you’ll get a complete breakdown of all of your top shared content.
BuzzSumo also keeps track of trending content, a feature which can be leveraged to help you generate new content ideas, identify relevant third-party links to share on your social media sites, and pinpoint valuable real-time marketing opportunities. The service also allows you to identify relevant influencers in your niche so you can gain a better understanding of the types of content your target audience is consuming. The bottom line? When it comes to optimizing your content, BuzzSumo is an invaluable resource.
– SEMRush
SEMRush is actually an SEO keyword tool, but it can be leveraged to help you refine your insight into your target audience. With SEMRush, you can conduct comprehensive keyword research to figure out what your target audience is searching for, track keyword rankings, keep track of your competitors, and conduct a complete SEO audit of your blog.
NB: Don’t forget to grab Enstine’s ebook on Affiliate Marketing for bloggers. Use coupon code CD16
Social Media
Social media is a key component of every great blogging strategy. By effectively leveraging the power of social media, you can significantly improve the visibility of your blog and its content, as well as driving more meaningful engagement. For a bit of help in the social media department, be sure to take a look at the following services:
– AdEspresso
Facebook Ads can be used to drive traffic to your blog. The key, however, is to develop compelling Facebook ads that will entice your target audience to click. That’s where AdEspresso comes in. This useful service can help you to drive up your ads’ click-through rates (CTRs) by providing a range of different tools that help optimize ad content and ad performance, ensuring that you maximize the potential of ad placement, timing, and custom audiences. AdEspresso provides top-notch analytics, daily actionable suggestions that help you improve your campaign, and tools for easy ad testing. There is even a 14-day free trail to get you started. Check it out here
– Commun.it
Commun.it is an invaluable service that helps you maximize the impact of your Twitter actives. The services provides actionable insights based on the behavior of your followers, allows you to measure the impact of your Twitter efforts based on a number of different metrics, helps you identify and engage with your top supports and key influences in your niche, and helps you build and effectively manage Twitter lists. A number of prominent brands use Commun.it, including Microsoft, CocaCola, MTV, Nike, and Sony.
– TagBoard
When it comes to social media, hash tags are key, particularly on sites like Instagram and Twitter where users rely on hash tag to find new content and connect with new brands. Using the right hash tags is therefore an excellent way to connect with more of your target audience. Luckily, TagBoard can help you figure out which hash tags to use to maximize impact.
– InkyBee
Cultivating and maintaining great relationships with influencers in your niche or target industry is an excellent way to enhance the visibility of your content and drive more traffic to your blog. InkyBee is the perfect tool to help you identify those influencers. The service boasts a powerful contact management tool to help facilitate influencer engagement, as well as a relationship track feature to help you track your day-to-day interactions with those influencers. Additionally, the service helps you track keywords and mentions of your specific campaigns and initiatives across the blogosphere, measure the results of your influencer outreach efforts, and track relevant traffic data.
Optimization Tools
Effective blogging isn’t just about driving new traffic to your blog. You need to develop trust with your visitors and work to ensure that they keep coming back for more content, as opposed to just visiting once. Of course, developing high-quality, compelling content is the first step when it comes to turning a casual visitor into a regular, loyal reader. However, optimizing your blog to ensure an excellent user experience is also important. You need to make sure your blog is visually appealing, your site is speedy and responsive, and that users can easily find the information they are looking for.
– Olark
Olark is a service that allows you to provide an easy platform for customer support, which is integral if your blog has any kind of ecommerce features that customers can use to purchase products or services from your brand. The great part is that you can customize the functionality and aesthetics of this live chat feature to meet the unique needs of your brand.
– Optimizely
This service helps you optimize user experience across all device types, including web, mobile apps, and desktop. Optimizely provides testing (including A/B, multivariate, and multi-page testing), personalization, and analytics solutions to help you perfect every aspect of user experience, which in turn helps you increase engagement and boost revenue.
– Unbounce
A high bounce rate is never a good thing, as it means that while you might be driving traffic to your blog, once users get there they aren’t sticking around. Luckily, Unbounce can help with that, helping you to build more powerful landing pages that will keep users around for longer, driving up engagement rates and improving conversion rates.
– VWO
When it comes to optimizing your blog, testing helps you to figure out what is working—and what isn’t. VWO is an easy-to-use testing tool that helps you to more effectively run A/B, multivariate, and multi-page testing. The tool also boasts heat maps and click maps so you can more effectively position content, as well as offering comprehensive analysis and reporting capabilities.
Image Sources
Users like visual content. That is why blog content with images consistently performs better than blog content without images. It sees more social shares and higher levels of engagement. If you are looking for high-quality, compelling images for your blog, there are a number of different services that can help you find them.
Pixabay, Compfight, Alegri Photos, and Pic Jumbo all offer a range of free stock photos for you use.
Email Marketing
No, email marketing isn’t dead. Far from it. In fact, just like social media, email marketing is an excellent way to enhance the visibility of your blog. To harness the power of email marketing in your blogging strategy, you will definitely want to make use of the following tools.
– MailChimp
This online email marketing service provides a range of different features that will boost the ROI of your email marketing efforts, including advanced analytics and a range of powerful automation tools.
– GetResponse
With a simple and easy-to-use interface, GetResponse allows you to easily send email newsletters, campaigns, online surveys, and follow-up auto-responders. You van design more professional looking newsletters with the service, and improve your targeting capabilities.
– Aweber
Aweber provides you with affordable access to high-quality and easy-to-use email marketing and auto-responder tools. Specifically, you can connect Aweber to other platforms, such as PayPal or your blog, which means that if a customer gives you your email address it will be much easier for you to keep track of it and follow up with them. And with the drag and drop interface, creating email marketing campaigns has never been easier.
Web Hosting
Last but not least, there is no use investing time, energy, and resources into producing high-quality content for your blog unless you have a reliable web hosting service to host it on.
By choosing a reliable web hosting service, you maximize uptime, ensuring that when people visit your site they will be able to access it. If a user visits your blog but is unable to access it because it’s down, you’re unlikely to convert that user into a regular reader.
To maximize you blog’s uptime and ensure effective web hosting, choose a reliable web hosting service. InMotion, A Small Orange, WP Engine, and InterServer are four web hosting services I recommend. My site, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, for example, is hosted on InMotion VPS Hosting (here’s my detail review on InMotion Hosting).
Bottom line
Blogging can be a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. With a little help from these 20 tools in 2016, you’ll be running a better blog that drives more engagement in no time at all.
NB: Don’t forget to grab Enstine’s ebook on Affiliate Marketing for bloggers. Use coupon code CD16
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