How to Advertise Your Blog Effectively

After writing yesterday’s post on How to Get More Retweets, I started thinking about some of the other avenues for advertising your blog. These days you can buy tweets, AdWords campaigns, ad space on other blogs and in their newsletters, but do you really know how to advertise your blog effectively without throwing your hard earned money down the tube with little, if any, return?

Relevancy of the Advertising Avenue

Image via Wikipedia

Is the site you are looking to purchase advertising on directed towards the same audience you are looking to reign in? There is some cheap ad space available out there, but if it’s on a sporting goods site and you are blogging about homeschooling, it may not be the best match.

The same thing goes for buying tweets. Ensure you are getting your money’s worth. Check out the twitter account owner. What’s their message? Who are their followers? Have they already spammed them to death? Don’t just look at the number of followers. If they are unrelated to your blog, or are inactive users, you are not going to get your money’s worth. You are better off asking a few of your own followers to spread the word, or go through a company like SponsoredTweets that will allow you to target those users that will give you the biggest return.

Relevancy of Your Ad

Now that you know who you are targeting and where they are at, due diligence is required to ensure you are saying the right thing to get them over to your blog. This is a great time to pull out some split testing if it is allowed, and if you can afford it. Get two ads going and see which one is working. Do a little investigating. What are those viewers looking for? Can you offer that? Make it clear in your ad what you can offer.

Relevancy of your Landing Page

Make sure the page you are directing those new viewers to is going to showcase the best of the best on your blog. Your front page may not be the best option. If you need to set up a special landing page, do. Tell those new viewers who you are, what they will find on your blog, maybe a few of your best posts, why they should become a regular reader, and some type of call to action. Maybe you want them to subscribe to your email list, buy your ebook, follow you socially…you get the picture. Tell them exactly what you want. Or, they may not know.

Start out slowly and watch your results. If you are utilizing a split test system, you will soon see which ad is converting better; therefore, you can invest further into that campaign. Advertising your blog effectively is more than simply hitting up the unknown guy on Fiverr that claims to have 1,000,000 followers. You need to be both proactive and reactive to get the biggest bang for your buck.