Almost 2 years ago, I started a blog. It was a blog about Tips and Trciks. The decision to start a blog was the best career decision I have ever made in my life, ever. It has helped me to shape my digital marketing career and made me what I am today.
Some of the main modules in digital marketing are as follows:
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Advertising
- Email Marketing
To become a true digital marketer, you should be able to conduct high-quality digital marketing campaigns to help build brands.
To master one of the mentioned skills, it will take a lifetime and it’ll be almost impossible to do so with the traditional method of learning like books and caching etc. You can only become a master when you successfully apply the knowledge, not when you complete the learning. And, considering the fast-changing nature of the skills, you’ll need to constantly learn and apply.
Now, let’s look into each one of the skills and how blogging can help you to master in it.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing is the greatest skill that’s in huge demand. Content marketing is not just writing a blog post or article on blog and publishing it.
According to Seth Godin, content marketing is the only marketing that remains. It has gained more traction as more and more businesses are starting to realize the importance of it. And it is mainly because the ads are becoming inefficient by each day.
How can Blogging Help You to Master in Content Marketing?
The three important phases of content marketing are — planning, creation, and promotion.
You sitting down to put together the blogging calendar for a month is more or less equal to content marketing planning phase. With each blog post idea, you have a goal — what you want to achieve through that particular blog post and a plan — how you’re going to achieve the goal aka what to write in the post. If you’re not doing this activity, there is a good chance your posts will not be helping you to achieve your bigger goals.
When you start writing the blog post, you do a bit of research on the topic or idea, then create an outline first and then you write the blog post, edit it and publish it. It is equal to the content creation phase. researching, outlining, writing, editing and publishing are the main steps of the content creation process. With each blog post you write, you’ll be able to refine each of the steps and in time, you’ll be mastering it.
Blogging doesn’t stop with publishing what you’ve written. Getting visitors to read, share and promote is the next important step.
When it comes to promotion, you have plenty of options - social media marketing & advertising, search engine optimization & marketing, email marketing etc. We’ll discuss them when we approach those skills. Here you learn the promotion phase of the content marketing.
Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO is the most difficult skill to master. Google is tweaking its ranking algorithm 200 times a year which keeps the practitioners on their toes as the tactics that worked before could become useless at the instant Google pushes an update.
When you write your blog post, you would’ve done keyword research to pick the right keyword to focus and competitor research to know what kind of content your competitors have published. Those two steps are the starting of a good SEO process.
While writing the blog post, you’ll be using the ‘target keyword’ in the right areas to improve the ranking possibilities of that article. Also, you’ll be using it in the URL and anchor texts. It is the ‘on page optimization’ part of SEO.
Once publishing the post, You can use social channels to promote it. You’ll also consider tactics like commenting or posting the blog post link in the communities or using social bookmarking etc. Those steps are part of the ‘link building’ component of the SEO.
So, while focusing on writing and promoting your blog post, you’re mastering the crucial components of SEO.
Search Engine Marketing:
If you really want to successful in blogging, you cannot just stand on the organic traffic. As it might take a while to receive the organic traffic to your new blog posts, you can leverage Google Adwords and Bing Ads to gain instant traffic.
And, if you chose to use this tactic, you’ll be learning to create ad campaigns, writing adverts, measuring and optimizing the ads which mean, you’ll be mastering search engine marketing aka PPC advertising.
Social Media Marketing:
Social Media is an essential component to succeed in blogging and in earlier times blogging is considered as a social media activity because your blog posts can evoke comments, likes, and shares from the readers.
Social Media Advertising:
It’s a known factor that Facebook doesn’t want to you get much of free likes and shares and the organic reach for the posts are diminishing by the day. Running successful social media ads have become a crucial component to succeed as a blogger. Many bloggers have failed to recognize this change and adapt to it and it has cost them, robbing many of their readers and the shares from them.
Email Marketing:
List building and blogging go hand in hand and any successful blogger (or the ones who want to become a successful blogger) will focus on it. Also, as part of monetizing the blog, bloggers use email to support their revenue generation plans. Keeping the readers updated with the latest blog posts through weekly newsletters, engaging readers with email only contents and promoting products and services through emails are few of the email tactics commonly used by the bloggers. And those tactics are the most important components of email marketing. When you build, manage and engage your email list, you are also en route to mastering email marketing.