How to Effectively Start-up Your Marketing Blog

When designing a marketing blog, I prefer adopting a simplistic strategy targeted towards a single objective – Make my prospects take the desired action.

This can be summed up in the form of subscribing to your RSS feed, or fill in an opt-in form and get onto your mailing list. Sounds familliar? It should because it’s the same strategy I’ve employed with my blog.
I prefer an opt-in form, but the RSS feed option is still as effective. I’ve chosen the mailing list as the primary subscribtion method because RSS feed are not read as much as emails are.

The last thing that you want to do with your prospect is  confuse him with a ton of options to choose from. You know what’s the outcome of this, right? He leaves. Confused people do anything.

How can you implement a simplified prospecting system on your blog?

The starting point is choosing a simple yet effective theme. The best choice available on the market today are Thesis Theme and Frugal Theme. Between these two I prefer Thesis.

What sets Thesis Theme apart from the broad collection of other wordpress themes is its adaptability in configuration without knowing HTML or CSS programing. In addition to this,  Thesis manages the space on your webpage very effectivelly. So I strongly recommend it.

Here is a link to the Thesis Theme presentation that should clarify its features in depth. I really don’t have anything negative to say against Frugal, but I prefer Thesis.
In addition to deciding what theme to use you’re also free to consider some customization of it or even ordering your unique theme. It all depends on the budget you have available. For custom designing your theme I recommend:

99designs.com – Cool way to get great design work done for cheap. Simply create a contest to get designers and developers to compete for your project. You decide the winner and pay only for the one you like most.
WordPressFreelance.com – Freelance website for WordPress developers and designers.

For more information on the subject check this post from niche-market-strategies.com titled How to Choose a Profitable WordPress Theme.

Blog’s general layout

Once having chosen your theme we could pass on to the next faze of structuring your blog and that is deciding upon the general layout of your blog.
Again, my personal favorite is a two column blog with the left column destined for writing posts and the righ (sidebar) for navigation, opt-ins and other options widgets.

In the sidebar you could also include some advertisment of the products/business you promote, but one thing you should keep in mind about advertising on your blog – don’t over do it; this will transform your blog into an advertising billboard or worse, a blig-blig circus.

Your objective is providing valuable content for your prospects and working at branding yourself, not to have another place where you can pitch your products to everyone else.

Related with the content provided within your blog, I suggest utilizing colours that favor readability. Sticking with the traditional white background and black font text is a safe option. Posting on the left column it’s also destined to enhance readability.

Improve blog ‘s features

The freelance community of wordpress programmers have made available  a whide spectrum of plugins directed to improve the wordpress experience, both from the user’s as well as the visitor’s stand point. This section cannot be considered as an optional step, instead you should pay close attention at some of the features, a.k.a. plugins, that your marketing blog must have in order to be seen, read and interacted with, thus creating a steady community of loyal readers and, in the same time, qualified prospects.

Here are some indispensable plugins that your blog must be equipped with:

Akismet – This plugin eliminates most of the comment spam issues. A “must have” component for any blog;
Sociable – This neat plugin adds a configurable list of social bookmarking and social networking links that allow visitors to organize and share your content;
Google Analyticator – This plugin places your Google Analytics tracking code on your entire WordPress blog. Tracking is ESSENTIAL, so make sure you get a free Analytics account and install this plugin;
Subscribe To Comments – Great little plugin that allows users who comment to be notified when new comments are posted. Promotes interactivity and encourages discussions;
Related Posts – Increases the “stickiness” of a website by listing similar posts at the bottom of the content;
Popular Posts – Allows you to list the most popular posts in your sidebar;
PodPress – An easy way to stream podcasts on your website;

You’re not restrained to this short list of plugins. There are thousands more that can be found on WordPress.org website.

SEO improvements

The best part about plugins is that they can deal with a wide variaty of blog functions, including SEO, or search engine optimization. What can be a challenging task, both financially and technically with a regular, static website, with blogs this is reduced to a one-step process. At least… this is how I learned of dealing with it; with one plugin called Traffic Getting SEO PluginTM 2.0.
All you have to do is go to undergroundtraininglab.com, get into Jef Johnson’s mailing list and you can download this free plugin which, once installed, will automatically make the necesary tweaks to SEO optimize your blog marketing without spending one cent and no more then ten minutes.

If you prefer, can always upgrade to the paid version. If it sounds kind of hypei, my apologies, but this plugin works. But you’re free to make a quick search on Google for these terms…

Another SEO plugin (included is Traffic Getting SEO PluginTM 2.0.) is All in One SEO Pack. This is a must have for any blog and it can be downloaded from wordpress.org/extend/plugins.

(again, there are no affiliate links in this post)

Let me know what you think about the informatin covered in this post, with a comment in the area below.

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