If you hate blogging but want to build an online presence, there are alternatives to blogging. Blogging is a good cheap method of building an online presence; but it’s not for everyone.
Some people just don’t like writing or perhaps your topic is not one which lends itself well to blogging regularly. If you’ve made your mind up that blogging isn’t for you, there are options available. Of course a blog can be a low level addition to the other activities you do online to build a business, or to generate traction. So a blog doesn’t have to be the main activity you do. Many bloggers only post once or twice a week. So it’s still worth considering a blog, even if you’re not a big fan.
Over time, blogging can build up and generate a nice passive income if you do it for long enough. But it can take years to build up a blog to a level where you can take you foot off the accelerator pedal; and for many people it’s just way too much work! So, here’s a few alternatives to blogging you can use to generate traction online.
Alternatives To Blogging: PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is one of the best marketing alternatives you can use. With pay per click advertising you can set up an advert targeted towards a specific search, or a certain person. Google’s Adwords program lets you target specific searches on Google which are relevant to your target audience. Compared to blogging, you can instantly turn on an advert you pay for.
Whereas with a blog post, it can take months for it to rank on the search engines and get traction. Plus, it might never rank at all which means you’re only other chance of getting traffic to a blog post is by sharing it yourself and linking back to it, which can be incredibly labour intensive and time consuming; perhaps reasons not to blog!
Paid marketing can be much more easily scaled up too. With a blog, you’ll need to stick at it for months, perhaps even years to see the return on your efforts. With a paid ad, you see immediately if it’s working or not. So you can increase budget on performing ads and decrease budget on those which don’t perform well. Other paid ad platforms:
- YouTube
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Twitter and other social media platforms
- Plus many more
Alternatives To Blogging: Landing Pages
One of the best ways to use a paid marketing campaign is in conjunction with a landing page and follow up with email marketing. You can build an online business without a website or blog and only through using email marketing and landing pages.
A landing page is a specific web page built deliberately with only one aim: to get people to subscribe to your email list. With a blog, visitors can browse around, click through your content and basically have a nosey! But with a landing page there’s only two actions visitors can perform: leave or sign up! This means you can optimise a landing page much more effectively for getting people onto your email list. Then follow up with email marketing messages selling your product or service.
Here’s an example of a landing page:
Once you have optimised a landing page for opt ins, you can increase marketing budget and build an email list of subscribers very quickly using email marketing. See also the power of email marketing.
Alternatives To Blogging: Email Marketing
Email marketing is a good alternative to blogging, although you need a source of leads in order to build a large email list. As mentioned, this can be done with paid marketing, but there are many other ways too. Once you have a source to build your email list, you can steadily increase your marketing efforts to increase the number of leads you attract to a landing page every day.
Once visitors subscribe to your email list, you can follow up with useful information regarding the topic visitors are interested in and sell products related to your topic.
Email marketing works really well because you can build a relationship with your subscribers over an extended period of time. Whereas with a blog, most visitors will only stick around for a few minutes before they leave forever!
As your email list grows you should find you are making more sales if your marketing and messages have a congruent message and your subscribers are well targeted. See also customer avatar worksheet.
V’logging: Video Blogging
V’logging or video blogging is a suitable alternative to blogging if you are more comfortable on video than with writing. YouTube is considerably less competitive than Google search too, so it can be easier to attract an audience through uploading regular visitors to YouTube than articles to a blog.
You will still need to upload videos on a regular basis over a long period of time to build a large audience organically through YouTube though. You can of course run paid advertising with YouTube also, testing and measuring your ads until you find a winning advert.
YouTube is expensive though so you should only do this if you have a high ticket sales funnel and can recoup your advertising budget with a number of high ticket sales or subscription products (which pay recurring commissions). Otherwise you’ll need to go the organic route which can take some considerable time and effort, much like blogging. There’s also TikTok to consider for video blogging.
Social Media Strategies
There’s multiple social media platforms where you can find people who match your target audience. Connect with them somehow and promote your products/service.
One method of doing this is through using Facebook. Facebook has a number of groups within the platform where you can join with others to discuss specific topics. You can use this feature to connect with people and lead them back to your profile where they can find your offer. See also unpaid social media marketing and free Facebook traffic strategies.
There’s many other platforms you can use too such as Quora.com where you can answer questions relating to your topic and lead people directly to your website/offer. See affiliate marketing on Quora and using Quora to drive traffic.
Other Social Media platforms:
- Rumble
- TikTok
- YouTube
- etc.
Summary
Blogging is a long term and slow marketing strategy but it’s cheap, which is perhaps it’s main appeal! Unfortunately it takes a huge amount of blogging to get traction online if you’re considering doing it to build an income. The good thing about blogging is that if you stick with it for long enough, you can earn passively from the work you’ve done previously on a blog. But the long road of blogging isn’t for everyone and not all topics are appropriate for a blog either.
If you want to build an online business faster, you should consider using paid marketing strategies and a high ticket sales funnel with multiple products within it including high valued products and subscription products which pay out recurring income. Learn more about this kind of online business with this video series.
