How to Increase Blog Traffic Using the Marketing Mix

Whether your blogging for your business or just blogging for the things that happen in your everyday life, you need to increase the traffic and numbers of visitors to your blog. We know that traffic converts to profit, and profit means money we can use to spend and buy the things we want. For online entrepreneurs, they do their best to make money online, such as doing the best Search Engine Optimization and applying the latest social media promotion. But will SEO become enough to boost the traffic of your blog? Some online marketers say that content is king, while others are saying that it is SEO that is king. My 5-month old blog is currently enjoying some pretty amount of traffic which gives me some advertising income and is already surpassing some of its competitors which are even older for a year or more. The sweet thing is that I did not pay any amount of cash for advertising and other online marketing campaigns. My secret is neither just SEO nor only content. My secret is a marketing mix. Now, I’m going to share you how I use the marketing mix to increase my blog traffic.

What is the Marketing Mix?

The marketing mix is popularly known as the idea of mixing the “Four ‘P’s” of marketing mix: product, price, place (distribution) and promotion. If you are a marketer or have studied marketing, the “marketing mix” and the four Ps are surely among the most familiar terms you have in mind. The concept is to have the best mix of ingredients to form the best value you can provide to your customers, as well as to your brand or business. The four P’s are the factors that a marketer can control, subject to the internal and external constraints of the marketing environment. The marketing mix is used to achieve customer-oriented marketing goals. A marketer can do research and experiment to come up with different variations of marketing mix. The successful marketing mix is one that can provide satisfaction and positive feedbacks from the consumers. Now, let’s discuss how we can use the marketing mix and four Ps to boost traffic in our blogs.

Product

If you’re a blogger what is your main product? The answer is your blog posts. These are what you offer to your consumers – the user of your contents. To attract more visitors, you need to create quality in your blog posts. Quality blog posts are those which are useful and helpful to users or readers. These are also the contents that provide answers to your users’ questions and solutions to their problems. The quality of blog posts is very important because even if your promotion is excellent and you will gain lots of visitors, if you are publishing poor quality posts, your visitors will surely not come back again.

Price

Price is the amount of consideration you are expecting from your blog’s users. In this blog, visitors can read all our articles for free, whether premium contents or not. That gives me an advantage over other websites that restrict their premium contents to paying members. The consideration bloggers are expecting from their users doesn’t only limit to money, some blogs requires their visitors to take actions, such as taking a survey or subscribing their email to access their contents. This is also a significant element we need to consider in our blog’s marketing mix.

Place

Place is the location and channels where users access our contents. In blogging, the place may represent our blog’s URL (domain name) and the links that connect people to our blog. These also include other blogs, websites, social media sites and RSS subscriptions where we distribute some or part of our contents. Our domain name is the main gate to our blog. Our web host or server where our website and its contents reside also plays a vital role in the distribution of our contents. A reliable web host with enough bandwidth makes our blog efficiently accessible to users. Our blog should also become light, optimized and has an efficient navigation system to give users the convenience of a fast loading and a friendly user site. There should also be a minimization of ads, especially pop up ads which obstruct the readership of our blogs.

Promotion

Promotion involves offline endorsements, online advertising, banner advertising, directory listing, search engine optimization, social media promotion and other campaigns we do to promote our blog and increase the awareness of the public about it. Promotion represents all of the communications that a blogger marketer may use in the online and offline marketplace. Promotion also involves public relations, such as helping people, making friends and promoting your integrity. Most bloggers concentrate on SEO, i.e., optimizing their blog pages to be positioned higher or on the top of the search engines, especially Google. While SEO (promotion) can be the efficient magnet that attracts more visitors to our blog, the other elements of our blog marketing (product [content], price and place) are the elements that give our blogs constant and lasting traffic.

Conclusion

The way to increase blog traffic is not only to a good SEO, nice blog design, or quality blog posts. The secret to attract more visitors to our blog is a good marketing mix: the successful mixing of SEO, contents, design, and usability. This is the holistic marketing approach to boost the traffic of our blogs. As we will realize, great contents or blog posts are futile if they are not known, accessible or distributed to users. On the other hand, an excellent SEO or promotion can also be a temporary traffic success if the contents that your visitors are expecting do not provide value. Therefore, if you want to become a successful blogger, you need to experiment and become a good mixer of these marketing elements. Finally, blog marketing doesn’t only needs king, whether its content or SEO, but it needs a united kingdom, where there is king, knights, bishops, castles, horses, soldiers and people.