Business Sphere

    I received emails from four bloggers, commenting on my previous post titled “A Blogger’s Proven Tips To Generate Traffic To Your Blog By Maximizing Ads In Other Blogs” and on my follow up post on “How To Promote Your Blog On Other Blogs To Maximize Traffic.”

     In that posts, I discussed my own experience about promoting my blog to generate traffic. This is because I have observed that many bloggers commit the mistake of doing little or nothing at all to make their blogs known to their target readers. They just hope that once they have already launched their sites, traffic will just follow as a consequence.

     That is why I have stressed in my two previous posts that a blog is a business and that being so, it requires business strategy and tactics to make it successful. I have found out that one of the proven business strategy is the advertising tactic – designed to promote your blog to your target readers.

     Over the past month, I have catalogued a great number of what I call “bloggers’ marketing mistakes”.  Although I found it difficult to believe in what they posted on their blogs and on their comments in discussion forum, here are the six most common marketing mistakes.

     1). “My blog is my marketing tool, so why should I advertise?”  At first glance, this seems to make sense. But it speaks of a total misunderstanding of the role of marketing, especially advertising and promotion, in making the blog known to the world, especially to the target audience. Since everyday there are 175,000 new blogs created, and the blogosphere is already over populated by tens of millions of blogs, how would people know that your blog exists unless your promote it?  Besides, why would they visit your blog when there are many millions blogs?

     2). “I already know who my target readers are.”  You may already know that your blog is for women, or for men’s interests, or for business, or for internet marketing or for blogging resources and what not. Fine with that. But do your target readers know your blog?

     3). “The only thing important to my blog is good quality content.” That is good. But unless you have traffic daily, your good quality posts will not get read.

     4). “Advertising is just a waste of money. I’m here to make money.” It is true that you have to spend money to advertise your blog on other blogs or in the ad network. But I know other bloggers who have tried advertising their blogs will agree with me that blog-to-blog advertising has a profound impact on traffic, especially generating absolute unique visitors daily.

     5). “Marketing is only for bloggers who have something to sell online.” Marketing, especially promotion which is a function of marketing, applies to all blogs, and not only to blogs dealing with internet marketing or with a product to sell.

     6). “SEO is more important than promotion.” I think search engine optimization is fine, so does blog promotion. Like a cart and carriage, SEO and blog promotion go hand in hand and each is useless without the other.

     As bloggers, no matter what our blogs are and what niche and business we are in, we’re engaged in marketing and promotion to sustain and expand our readership and to differentiate our blogs from the many other blogs. Otherwise, we will also commit the same mistakes many bloggers make, resulting to the untimely demise of their blogs.