The Perfect Blog Marketing Tech Stack?

This website is called the Blog Marketing Academy. But, what exactly is…. blog marketing?

Is blog marketing synonymous with simply blog monetization? Or, is it something more?

The idea of “making money with a blog” usually falls into the world of affiliate links and/or banner advertising. Both of those things can be legit. While I no longer use any banner ads whatsoever, I definitely did back in my tech blogging days. And I do indeed do affiliate marketing, although affiliate revenue only accounts for about 20% of the overall revenue that the Blog Marketing Academy generates.

For me, blog marketing is about more than what the typical blogger does.

Blog marketing is using a blog to sell. It is about using a blog to be a major sales medium for a business. This means that the blog is strategically engineered so as to:

• Attract leads
• Segment visitors
• Move people along in the sales funnel

This is decidedly different than posting blog posts with “buy now” buttons on it, or having a sidebar littered with banners. No, a well-designed blog will drive sales without even looking like it. And it does that by always catering to the interest of the person looking at the site and showing them what is appropriate to them based on where they are in the sales cycle.

Blog marketing done well works because the blog itself is  set up from top to bottom to be a content CONVERSION environment. And much of what is going on takes place behind-the-scenes and unbeknownst to the visitor.

See, a blog alone doesn’t have much marketing power at all. It sits there, usually powered by Wordpress, and has blog posts on it. Great. People comment perhaps. But usually they’ll read the post and take off. This is grossly inefficient and does very little to generate any revenue.

For a blog to become a true marketing MACHINE for you, it has to be set up in a strategic way and it has to be coupled with other tools. Together, we can call this package of tools a “tech stack”. That term “stack” is one many people use to refer to the group of tools they use to power their operation.

This tech stack, then, is a group of tools which work together in unison to perform the marketing function. Your blog is just one component of that stack. It is the front face of the stack, but you’ll definitely have other things going on behind the scenes.

In the coming issues of The Edge, I’m going to go over the components of the perfect blog marketing stack.

We’ll be talking both tools and strategy… and how it all works together.

We’ll get started on this next week here on The Edge, so simply stay tuned for that. 🙂 But, one thing first…

I’m sure you realize that having a great tech stack doesn’t do much for you without a solid business foundation. It would be like a person collecting a bunch of tools with which to build something cool, but then having no idea what to build. Clearly, the tools don’t matter much without a purpose.

I spend a lot of time inside The Lab working with people just starting out in order to develop and prove their business foundation BEFORE hopping into the world of blogging. Launching a blog and writing a bunch of stuff is rather pointless if you haven’t developed the foundation first.

Very often, it gets hung up on the very idea of what market to serve. In other words, your “niche”. So, if you’re still hung up on that, I invite you to my free Niche Training Workshop. My goal on that workshop is to make the idea of selecting a good niche for you simpler than perhaps you see it now.

Alright, my friend. See ya next week… and enjoy your weekend.

– David