WordCamp to go: Marketing for bloggers

This is information I took away from WordCamp Birmingham. The notes below are simply things that were new or important to me and do not begin to cover all of the information offered. I’d recommend following the SlideShare links for more details. Today’s post is my notes from marketing strategies for bloggers.

Online Marketing

Brandon Eley presented on 5 Strategies Bloggers Should Learn from Online Marketers. If you want to learn more about his 5 strategies go watch his SlideShare presentation for that. I’ll just include a few ideas and links that were important to me.

• Brandon started with advice everyone has heard before, but is always worth repeating: Set specific goals. Depending on what you want to accomplish, you will make different decisions about how to design and market your site. This is an important point as the goal of selling your book is a lot different than a goal of sharing your photography with friends.
• Once you know your goals, you can improve your calls to action. To understand how well you are doing in this regard it’s important to use a traffic analysis tools, Google Analytics being the most obvious. In addition to that, Google Website Optimizer will allow you to test different presentation options on your website and get a report on which is most effective. This is a tool I was familiar with but for some reason have not used. I feel like I’ve lost money by ignoring this free resource.
• It may be valuable to Target visitor segments with different messages. Again, you can use Google Website Optimizer to test this, but depending on your goals search engine visitors may behave differently than your loyal RSS subscribers. And each segment may value sales pitches differently.
• Twitter and Facebook can help increase trust among your readers and customers. If you have a large number of followers, sharing your subscribers numbers may be useful. Don’t be shy about showing your client list and using testimonials and press mentions on the site to improve credibility.
• Depending on your goals, it may be important to build your brand and position yourself as an expert. Don’t be afraid to promote your own products in your blog.

Some sites (and a couple of books) worth checking out:

• Conversion Rate Experts blog
• Get Elastic blog
• CrazyEgg – Build site heatmaps and track clicks
• Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer
• Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions