How To Write A Foolproof Marketing Plan For Your Blog (day 1)

Photo by Earthwatcher

This is day 1 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. For the next week, we’ll be talking about setting goals and measuring where you’re at now with your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc.

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The first thing we need is a marketing plan. One that serves three purposes:

1. Inspire action – Forget what you learned in college about marketing plans. Forget what you learned at your corporate gig. Screw all formality and form because they do not work. A study released by Babson College found that formal business plans are worthless. Instead, make yours a manifesto for your life. Use pictures, music, crayons – whatever it takes to inspire you.
2. Create a vision – Your plan should have a clear vision of your future. The more clear, the better chances of it materializing.
3. Help you play paper-toss – Your marketing plan, whatever form it takes and however it’s written, best serves you if it’s always in perpetual draft form. That way it never becomes self-limiting dogma that was once based on an inspiration that expired. Be willing toss it.

Include your goals in your marketing plan

Here are a few examples of social media goals:

1. Increase subscribers and/or traffic – This is a very common goal for bloggers. Achieving this type of goal can done in a number of ways: Improving content, improving engagement, optimizing subscriber opportunities, and giving away free stuff.
2. Enhance Brand Awareness – Social media can generate buzz for your non-profits simply by giving your fans reasons to share. This means creating awesome content and building a community that is passionate about what you do.
3. Improve Relevant Visitor Traffic – This means looking at your stats on most viewed pages to get a better idea about what people want to read. This goal also means spending time on social media sites that are highly relevant to your blog. For example, if you blog about supporting a family member with cancer, you can spend considerable time within a forum for cancer survivors and supporters.
4. Increase Online Donations (or sales) – To increase donations (or sales), you’ll need to engage with the influencers in the community, enhance your conversation strategy and improve engagement with current supporters. Social media is most effective when used to enhance relationships. Asking for money before getting to know folks rarely works with social media.

Foolproof Method For Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy

Still stuck? It might take months to even begin to solidify a strategy that works for your business and your life. The most important thing is that you keep listening to what you want and what your customers want.

John Jantsch, of Duct Tape marketing says it best:

“…any real marketing strategy is highly personal and involves your customers, market, competitors, suppliers, products and services [and you!!!!]. The best way to approach discovering a strategy for your social media participation, and perhaps all of your communications, is to listen really, really well. Social media is one of the greatest listening tools on the planet. Your customers are telling you about their fears and hopes, they’re telling about what they like about your products and dislike about the competition, they’re telling you what they wish someone would make – and now you can hear it.”

Homework: Write a marketing plan for your blog, make it simple and have harmonize with your life. Like I did.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.