Tools of Marketing: 15 Must-Have’s for Your Blog Marketing Toolbox

When I first started blogging, I felt overwhelmed.

I had so much new information coming at me, I sometimes had no idea what I was supposed to do first. I was taking the A-List Blogging Bootcamp with Mary and Leo Babauta, and they were providing so many great techniques and ideas, I soon lost focus and didn’t know where to put my energies.

So I asked them, and each of them had one piece of great advice that became my mantra for several months.

From Leo: Write tons of great content that addresses the needs and concerns of your readers and provides them with solutions.

From Mary: If you want to monetize your blog, start building an email list from the very beginning.

That advice kept me on track during the early phase of my blogging career and has definitely served me well. In a year and a half of blogging on Live Bold and Bloom, I have over 7600 subscribers, 32,000 monthly visits, and a loyal following of readers who purchase my products.

When to Start Monetizing

Once I reached 1000 subscribers, I felt it was time to switch my singular focus from creating and building my blog to learning how to market and monetize it. (As an aside, growing your subscribers must be a permanent part of your blogging strategy. But at some point, it doesn’t need to be the singular focus.)

So I started doing some research on how to make money from blogging and the various marketing strategies for doing that. If I thought I was overwhelmed before, this research unleashed an avalanche of information. There is certainly no shortage of experts in the blogosphere ready to sell you the latest and greatest products or teach you “the one definitive method” for making money online.

What I really wanted was a step-by-step guidebook telling me what was most important to do and showing me how to do it. And I needed that information from someone trustworthy and successful at making money online.

I needed a basic toolbox of ideas and resources that I could refer to regularly and implement in a logical way. Although there is not one “right” way to market and monetize your blog, there are some essential steps and tools that you need to have in place.

15 Must-Have Marketing Tools

If you are looking for that guidance and focus, here are 15 must-have tools for your blog marketing toolbox:

1. An autoresponder email marketing service like AWeber or Mailchimp. You must build your email list to market to your subscribers, and you need a service that will capture the emails and easily allow you to communicate with your readers. Right now is not too soon to set this up.

2. A free opt-in product or newsletter. You need to give your readers an incentive to subscribe in the form of a free eBook, report, guide, video, or newsletter. Optimally, this free product should be something you create yourself with high-quality content that shows your readers how much value you offer. Visit other blogs in your niche and look at the free products they offer to get some ideas. This should be available on your blog as soon as possible, as it will boost your subscriptions immediately.

3. An attention grabber. To further optimize your free product opt-in, put something on your blog (in addition to an opt-in form on your sidebar) that draws your reader’s attention to the opt-in product. There are a variety of options here, from a pop-up like Pop-Up Domination, to a more subtle approach like a form at the end of each post (like WPSubscriber). Readers become immune to the sidebar form, and it helps to remind them of the free product you are offering.

4. An SEO tool. As you are writing posts, creating products, or using social media for your blog, you want to use key words and phrases that will put you on the front page of search engines for your particular topic. The title of this post has a keyword phrase that Mary researched and discovered would be great for SEO. You can use a free tool like Google Keywords or a product like Market Samurai that gives you more in-depth research options.

5. A product to sell. If you are going to make money, you need to sell something. This could be an affiliate product (s) or something you create yourself. If you create a product yourself, you potentially will be able to make more income since you will get 100% of whatever you sell from your blog. You could also hire someone to create a product for you. Eventually you will want a mix of products (your own and affiliate products), as well as possible consulting services, courses, and/or a membership program to optimize the income you can generate.

6. A video training course. If you are not already doing this, you need to get comfortable creating videos. People absorb information and learn in different ways, and video is the optimal way for many people. Serious blog entrepreneurs recognize that creating high quality videos for use in posts, products, and social media is becoming more and more essential. We love a program called How To Screencast Like a Pro by Dave Kaminski. It’s a home study course, and we’ve found it to be the best out there, especially for the very reasonable price. This is an investment well worth the $99 expense. How To Create Great Looking Videos Without Guesswork is another great program by Dave that teaches the basics of creating videos.

7. A social media presence. You need a Facebook fan page for your blog and a Twitter page that has your logo and branding on them. If you don’t know how to do this, hire a designer to help you create these pages. Then you need to comment regularly on both, offering additional tips, insights, and ideas, as well as occasionally promoting your products.

8. A Facebook page reward. Your Facebook followers are another network of potential customers, just like your subscribers. Create a free product that you can offer as a reward for “liking” your fan page in order to build that list and create loyalty.

9. An email marketing strategy.  Create a regular routine of communicating with your readers through your posts as well as more personal broadcast emails. Pick an email marketing strategy that feels right for you involving pure content emails along with sales pitches. Check out this article for more info.

10. A stable of affiliate partners. Dramatically increase the number of sales you generate by having affiliates who sell for you. Read this article to learn how to build your affiliates and get them to work hard for you.

11. Affiliate products. As mentioned above, in addition to creating your own products, you will eventually want to sell affiliate products. Clickbank is a retailer for digital products. It is probably the most popular. You can be an affiliate for Clickbank merchants or sell your product through Clickbank. You can also be affiliate partner with other bloggers for their products.

12. JV Partners. Start now developing relationships with other bloggers in your niche with whom you can create products, courses, webinars, etc. Two or three people working together on a project provides a larger pool of potential customers, more resources, ideas and creators, and additional fun and motivation.

13. A You-Tube presence. This is another reason to learn how to create videos. YouTube is one of the biggest search engines. If you create a channel on YouTube and produce regular visitors, you can not only drive traffic to your blog, you can also make regular product sales. To learn how to create great videos for YouTube and build a YouTube marketing plan, check out Video Traffic Academy.

14. A niche site. Eventually you will want to expand your blogging empire beyond your authority site. You will want to have one or more niche sites. Niche sites clearly focus on a product or products or on a topic that encourages readers to purchase a product or service. Once you set up the site and learn to drive traffic to it, it becomes a source of regular passive income for you. We will be talking more about how to build a niche site in future posts. In fact, Mary is in the midst of a “grand experiment” with building niche sites. She will share her findings and the step-by-step approach for creating niche sites in future posts.

15. A small cash reserve. With any new business, you have to invest some money upfront to make money. Blogging is no different — except that the financial investment is much smaller than for most other businesses. You will need to purchase training tools, software, consulting help, and other services to help you market and monetize your blog. Set up a cash reserve in your Paypal account of $500-$1000 to use toward your marketing efforts.

If you have questions about any of these tools, we’ll be happy to answer them in the comments.