Blogging as a marketing strategy for your business takes several different abilities to be successful. While those skills may vary based on your niche, industry, or branding, here are the core skills that will improve your blog marketing.
1. Social Media
Social media marketing is about building a following that you can channel to your blog and your business. You have to discover who your target market is, which social platforms they use, and what kind of posts and content they prefer. For example, you can leverage social causes such as reducing the 7.8 billion tons of waste businesses discard annually.
2. Basic HTML
If you're working with web content, you should know some HTML (hyper-text markup language), the code by which webpages are created. Sure, you can buy text editors that convert to HTML, but that isn't always necessary, and may not help if you need to change the HTML later. If you want to make quick adjustments to your content, such as adding links or changing images, you need to know HTML.
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3. Technical Skills
HTML is a good start, but there's more technical knowledge involved. You may want to know some scripting or programming languages to customize your blog site. You'll probably need to lean about tools and software for creating audio, video, photo editing, and database use. A database master degree will benefit you in all aspects of modern business.
4. SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an absolute must. Search engines rely on different factors to rank your site for their indexes. It starts with keywords and phrases. This is how the search engines index your blog and its content. You can use keyword tools to find the most popular, most relevant keywords and weave them naturally into your content to improve your ranking.
5. Web Analytics
The traffic you draw is a good measure of how successful your blog is. Major social sites like Facebook and Twitter include analytic tools. You can also find them included in several blogging platforms or available as plugins, as well as third party tools. These analytics breakdown your number of visits, page views, length on page, abandonment rates, and more. Understanding these numbers can give you a clear idea of where your blog is headed or what kind of impact your last post or change had.
You can learn as you grow, or just learn enough to implement your latest idea. But the more you improve on these skills, the more effective your blogging will be.