Content Marketing For Bloggers

Note from Joanne: I’m very excited to have a guest blogger on Life With Joanne today. Amy Zellmer is a Creative Coach and is here to share her thoughts and advice on content marketing for bloggers.

One of the biggest mistakes I see new bloggers make is not having an opt-in offer for their audience. This opt-in gives you their email address in exchange for some type of content from you, your “freebie”. An example of a freebie might be an ebook, a pdf worksheet, a podcast, a video series, etc. This method of list building is called “Content Marketing”.

It is critical that you start building your list of followers in order to keep in touch with them. Five or so years ago, readers would go out of their way to read their favorite blogs on a regular basis. Nowadays, they are swamped with social media and your blog can lost easily. This is where a gentle email reminder can keep your content in front of them. Content Marketing can seem overwhelming at first, as there are some steps that you need to take to make it all work (plus creating your free giveaway item.) However, it is key component for you to grow your list.

The first step (and sometimes the hardest) is deciding what your freebie is going to be, and what form you’re going to present it in. Once you have your freebie created, you will need to create an opt-in box for your website/blog. I use a service called aweber to create mine. There is a very small learning curve, and if you use a WordPress site it is quite easy to enter the html code into your site.

After you have this set up, you will create a series of auto responders ~ with the first one sending them their freebie that they opted in for. I like to follow up in a few days to see if they have taken the time to read/listen to it and offer some words of encouragement for them to do so. In a few more days I follow up again, letting them know that I love hearing from my subscribers and would like to hear from what their problem area is that I could help them work through. From here, the opportunities are endless. You can send out an email to your list every time you create a new blog post, gently reminding them of your site and giving them content and links (personally, I put a teaser to my blog post in the email content, with a link to continue reading it on my site).

Having a list is vital to the success of your blog. As you start to grow your list, you may want to consider creating products that they might be interested in purchasing. If that seems overwhelming to think about now, that’s ok! Take baby steps, start with creating a freebie. I know you’ve got this!!

Amy Zellmer is a Creative Coach who lives in Saint Paul, MN with her Yorkie, Pixxie. She works with Creative Entrepreneurs who are ready to work through the issues that are holding them back and keeping them stuck. She believes that we all deserve as much success as we aspire to have, and she can help you get there!! Grab her free toolkit “3 Simple Strategies To Supercharge Your Success!” at: www.mycreativebizcoach.com and connect with Amy on social media: