How to Write a Blog Post: For Beginners!

11 Blogging Tips And Tricks For Beginners

11 blogging tips and tricks for beginners. Get more traffic and income from your blog.

In this video, you will learn the top blogging tips and tricks for beginners. I'll show you how to increase blog traffic, get more returning visitors, get more social media shares per posts, and how to get more revenue. I'll mention things like making your site load faster, collecting emails with tools like popups, setting up analytics, and much more. Enjoy the video!

How to Build a Social Media Marketing Funnel for Bloggers

Are you using your blog for business?
Wondering how to combine blog posts with social media content to move people through the sales cycle?
In this article, you’ll discover how to use blog posts to create social media content at every stage of your marketing funnel.

#1: Define Your Marketing Goal

Creating a social media marketing funnel is directly tied to your marketing goals. To begin, think of one marketing goal you want to accomplish. Beginning with a single short-term goal is much easier than tackling long-term goals. Also, choose a realistic, measurable goal so you can identify whether you’ve reached it.
Here are a few examples of goals that would make a great starting point for a social media marketing funnel:

• If you’re launching a new online course, aim for a specific number of pre-orders before you launch.
• If you’re opening a restaurant, focus on making a certain number of reservations for your first quarter of business.
• If you want to grow your email subscriber list, concentrate on increasing your rate of new subscribers from 8% per week to 10% per week.

#2: Publish Six Blog Posts to Create a Funnel to Support the Customer Journey

After you identify your goal, you want to ensure you publish content that leads people toward that goal. To do that effectively, your content must cater to people at different stages in the funnel. For each stage, write two blog posts that support your goal at each stage: awareness, trust, and conversion.

Your content should cater to people at different stages in the buying cycle.

Stage 1: Blog Posts That Create Awareness
To create awareness, think about blog posts that would attract new people to your brand and demonstrate what you can offer. Also, if your blog posts give people a quick-fix solution to a problem, you’ll earn enough trust for them to hang around and learn more.
In this first stage of the buying process, these types of blog posts work well:

• Top resources post: Share your best resources with your audience.
• Product and gift guides: Share about and rank products, gifts, and/or services that suit a specific purpose.
• How-to posts: Present a problem and demonstrate a solution (or many solutions) to that problem.
• Question-and-answer posts: Write a post in Q&A format to answer your readers’ burning questions about a product.

For example, Jane Friedman’s website helps writers navigate the publishing world, and this how-to post about how to publish a book explains a topic that would appeal to new authors who aren’t familiar with the process. The detailed post establishes her expertise in her field and offers an easy way to understand the traditional publishing process.

Create content that spreads awareness of your brand and attracts new followers.

Stage 2: Your Prospect Wants to Know, Like, and Trust You
At this stage, the word “want” is important. Marketers often assume that loyalty is hard-won. However, when you help people, they naturally want to like and trust you. Your prospect becomes eager to learn more and figure out if you can help. The higher the price tag, the more content you’ll need at this stage.
Here are five blog post types that work well for building trust, likeability, and loyalty:

• Customer case studies: Share a customer’s experience to show readers how your business helped that customer.
• Expert interviews: You might ask an expert to give insight into an issue that’s relevant to your readers.
• Inspirational and motivational stories: Tell a personal story to motivate and inspire your readers.
• Opinion pieces: Persuade readers to consider an alternative point of view by challenging conventional wisdom on an issue.
• Research breakdown: Analyze the takeaways from several current surveys or studies about a trend in your industry. Or summarize an industry report to help your readers understand how the information may affect them.

For instance, One Kings Lane sells furniture, décor, and interior design services. This expert interview about how to become more confident about choosing paint colors will appeal to an audience that’s interested in home décor and help prospects with a common problem.

Expert interviews are one way to help your prospects and build trust.

Stage 3: Your Prospects Are Warm and Ready to Take the Relationship Further
Conversion doesn’t necessarily mean asking for the sale. To illustrate, you might ask the reader to subscribe to your email newsletter so you can nurture the sale via email. However, it’s a myth that blog posts should never contain sales information.

When you’re in business, you’re supposed to ask for the sale. It’s absolutely okay and necessary for you to tell your potential customers how you can help them and why they should buy from you. Focus on attracting and nurturing relationships 80% of the time, but you can focus on conversions with the other 20%.
Here are three types of blog posts that work well for conversions:

• Call the reader to action: Run a challenge that motivates your readers to take action. You can organize a formal challenge where readers must sign up to participate or an informal challenge designed to foster a sense of community.
• Invite the reader to enter a competition/giveaway: Promote a product or service by enticing readers to enter a competition by writing no more than 25 words about a given topic.
• Launch a new product or service: Write a blog post announcing a new product and explain how the product helps your customers.

For example, when Buffer launched a tool that helps users tailor social media posts to various platforms, this blog post not only announced the new feature, but also explained the feature’s value. The post walks readers through all of the details involved in customizing posts, and then explains how the Buffer tool simplifies the process and saves time.

A blog post about a product or service can help you convert warm prospects

into buyers.

#3: Repurpose Published Blog Posts to Create Social Media Marketing Collateral

After your six blog posts are published, break your posts down into smaller chunks you can use on social media. Create graphics, videos, and so on to support each piece of content as you roll it out.
As a model, these six blog posts support the launch of a new blogging app:

• How to create a blog post strategy in 5 minutes or less (how-to)
• Ten tools for creating awesome images for your blog (tool roundup)
• How a business coach made $7K out of this mistake (customer case study)
• Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup (inspirational story)
• Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge (call readers to action by issuing a challenge)
• Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun (product launch)

Because you’ve started with blog posts, you can easily repurpose the content in other formats for use on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels.

RealSimple created an Instagram story based on a blog post about how to choose 

produce; at the end of the story, viewers could swipe up to read the original post.

From content in each example blog post, you can create social media content chunks such as the following:

• How to create a blog post strategy in 5 minutes or less: Native video, SlideShare presentation, infographic, Instagram story broken into five short videos demonstrating each phase of the process
• Ten tools for creating awesome images for your blog: Instagram multiple-image post, short tips to share on Facebook and Twitter
• How a business coach made $7K out of this mistake: Video testimonial, quote graphics, Instagram story broken into segments throughout the day
• Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup: Behind-the-scenes video, inspirational quote graphics
• Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge: Lead generation ad with downloadable document, live video Q&A for each day of the challenge, Facebook group for challenge participants
• Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun: Conversion ad with a call to action to purchase, recorded video that demonstrates the product, infographic that shows the product’s value

You can repurpose just one blog post for several social media platforms.

Notice all of the ways you can repurpose just one blog post. When Dustin Stout offered free downloadable templates based on a blog post, he not only gathered email addresses, but also created a YouTube video that explains how to use the templates.

Creating the Right Amount of Content for Your Prospects
Depending on your product, prospects may take their time to make a purchase, especially if what you’re selling is at a higher price point. In that case, it helps to allow a longer lead time in your marketing campaigns. Your audience’s tolerance for information frequency will determine your lead time.
For instance, a lower-priced product like a book or gadget may require only a one-week lead time and three pieces of content. A higher-priced product like a house or a pool may require a longer lead time and six pieces of content.

Conclusion
When you build a social media marketing funnel that supports a goal, you create more targeted and relevant content on both your blog and social media. Also, you can easily repurpose your blog posts for your social media marketing.
Remember to create content for each stage of the customer journey and adjust how much content you post based on your knowledge of your product and customers.

What do you think? Does your content build a social media marketing funnel? Have you repurposed blog posts to create content for social media? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments.

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7 Stellar Social & Email Marketing Blogs You Should Be Reading

 Receiving a few simple tips about what to post on your social media networks, or how to craft a catchy subject line can make a big difference in how well you market your business. But where do you uncover valuable email and social media marketing tips? On blogs, of course! With that in mind, we’ve compiled 7 stellar social media and email marketing blogs you should be reading (if you aren’t already!). They’re full of so much inside scoop, you’ll be way ahead of the social media and email marketing trends.

Social Media Blogs:
Social media networks are evolving at breakneck speed, and with new ones popping up all the time, how do you know where you should invest your time? Here are 3 social media-focused blogs that’ll keep you current:

1. Social Media Examiner
Social Media Examiner gives you the nuts and bolts you need to create a strong social media presence. While other sites may inform readers on changes and trends, this site really gets down to the nitty-gritty of how to get the most out of your social media pages, often with detailed or step-by-step instructions. What’s also cool, is that their posts cover several social media channels, so you know what’s going on beyond Facebook and Twitter. While the site’s main focus is of course, social media, it does an excellent job of delving into the relationship of social media with other aspects of your marketing, and how to integrate across multiple channels.

2. Mashable
Mashable is a well-known source for up-to-the-minute news on social media, technology, business and entertainment. The speed at which the publication is able to pick up stories, even obscure ones, is quite impressive. If Mark Zuckerberg goes to the bathroom, odds are Mashable knows about it. But seriously, for anything new that happens on Facebook, Twitter, or the other major players in the social game, Mashable gives the play-by-play. The layout of their website makes it easy to take in lots of information at once, and share it across your social media channels. Mashable also does a stellar job of covering buzzed-about mobile topics, which is increasingly important for marketers today.

3. Convince & Convert
Convince & Convert is focused on two things: Social Media and content creation. It offers practical advice about what works and what doesn’t. The mix of content is refreshing – There are some “5-step” articles, some “What not to do” articles, and some case studies of companies who’ve made social media work for them. And, as the name of the company suggests, they don’t leave out the metrics portion of social media. After all, what’s the point in spending time on social media if you don’t see any results? The casual tone and practical length of the posts also make Convince & Convert a digestible way to gain social media insights.

Email Marketing Blogs:
Ever wonder why only a certain portion of people you send an email to ever open it? Or why even fewer people actually click on a link inside of an email? Well, there are ways to get more mileage out of your email marketing with simple changes that’re easier than you may think! Here are a slew of blogs with game-changing techniques and advice for your email marketing.

4. Litmus
Sure, knowing the basics is important, but there’s more to email marketing than good content and click through rates. Litmus delves into the email marketing nuances that many other blogs just don’t tackle (that’s probably because they’re an email testing and analytics company)! If you want to understand why your email is looks different in Gmail vs. Outlook, or if you’re unsure about which browsers you should test in, Litmus covers the more technical aspects of email marketing. It’ll also keep you up to date to all the latest trends in email marketing, like mobile usage, design and optimization. Moreover, the increasing importance of using metrics to track return on investment (ROI) on marketing efforts makes Litmus a very useful resource.

5. Email Institute
The name really says it all. Email Institute (by Epsilon) is a comprehensive site dedicated to email marketing best practices. It’s a great place to go with questions. Whether you have inquiries about email content, design, delivery, or testing – or you just want to know how to grow your email list – the Email Institute has information for you. Consider it a library for your email marketing research!

6. Duct Tape Marketing
While the Duct Tape Marketing blog is not solely dedicated to email marketing, it’s an excellent resource for total marketing strategy, especially for small businesses. It focuses on the whole package – customer satisfaction, content creation, email marketing, social media, branding and so on. Best of all, it’s written in a very direct, non-technical way that anyone can understand. With daily posts by experts in the field, it’s a great way to stay informed and learn simple yet effective steps to improve your marketing strategy.

7. VerticalResponse 
We would be remiss if we didn’t tout our own blog here, right? From social media to email marketing and beyond, the VerticalResponse Marketing Blog is, if we DO say so ourselves, an excellent resource for all things small business. And while writing 3-5 new posts on the blog per week, you can bet we have info you’re looking for, and in a timely manner. On top of all of our awesome content we also offer a FREE email marketing tool.  The signup process only takes 30 secs and you don’t need a credit card. Start sending email newsletters and promotions to your customers today! Get Started

These are just seven of the many magnificent marketing blogs out there. Know of any other social media and email marketing blogs you find helpful and insightful for your marketing needs? Let us know!

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