Social Media Marketing Skills For Blogging Beginners (How To Get Them On The Cheap)
How To Learn Social Media Marketing Skills For Blogging Beginners
Are you struggling with social media marketing? I do too so I’ve come up with 5 tips (that you really should follow in order) to help you improve your social media marketing skills and so you can grow your blog and spread your message.
Is it just me or does it seem like some bloggers and entrepreneurs are just born to use social media?
They get tons of engagement, shares, and likes and you look at them and scratch your head wondering “How they do that”
Okay, perhaps you use better English when you ask but still.
For some, using social media just seems to come naturally to them whereas others (me me me), it is a struggle trying to figure it all out.
Well, I’ve been studying different social media platforms and I think I’m finally beginning to understand how some people seem to have social media marketing skills coming out of their pores.
I pray that what I share with you today will help you engage with people and help you reach others with your brand’s message.
Oh and if you need guidance beyond just social media, be sure to download my free Christian Blogging Business Roadmap.
It’s got all kinds of helpful steps on how to use your blog as a platform to promote your business and how to keep God in the center of it.
All right and now let’s learn how we can be amazing social media gurus!
This post may contain affiliate links which means I get a commission if you purchase something after clicking on one of those links. But don’t worry. I’m not going to recommend something I don’t really believe it because that would just be wrong.
5 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Marketing Skills As A Blogging Beginner
One of the best ways to learn about something is to take a class on that subject.
Learning how to gain social media skills is no different from learning how to gain any other skill.
A lot of the times, when you take a class from someone they have already worked through the pitfalls.
They’ve already made the mistakes for us so that we don’t have to.
Not only that but if the course creator has support or a Facebook group you can actually go to them and ask for feedback on your own social media accounts.
Or at the very least you can gain valuable feedback from other members in the Facebook group.
One of the courses I recommend is Pinterest Traffic Avalanche. I only loosely consider Pinterest a social media platform.
It’s a search engine but it has a strong social aspect.
You can check out the course right here.
I also have taken a course from Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger called Blog Traffic Blueprint which discusses how to use social media to bring traffic to your website or blog.
Both of these courses are excellent and have taught me so much. However what if you’re not ready or able to pay $200 for a single course?
Here are some cheaper options to help you learn more about social media marketing.
How To Learn About Social Media Marketing On The Cheap
One place you can go learn more about social media marketing is a website called Udemy.
Udemy is an online course marketplace.
They have excellent courses on a ton of different topics including social media marketing and blogging.
Just go to the Udemy homepage and type in social media marketing and you’ll see all kinds of options pop up.
And as you can see, their prices are very reasonable.
So if you’re looking for some courses to help you learn more about using social media to promote your blog Udemy is a great option!
Click here to learn more about Udemy!
Skillshare: Another great online course resource is called Skillshare.
Now Skillshare is different from Udemy in one major way.
With Udemy, you pay for each course individually.
With Skillshare, you pay one flat fee and you get access to all the courses on their platform.
So once you’ve gone to their website and created an account you can search for social media marketing.
And as you’ll see below, there are over 1200 social media marketing courses to choose from!
For $15 a month you can take as many classes as you want which is a cost-effective way to learn more about your blogging craft.
You can try Skillshare free for 14 days if you want to explore it and see what is offered.
Try Skillshare For Free For 14 Days
2) Stalk the Competition
One of the most helpful things that you can do is to “stalk your competition”. I know it sounds creepy but it’s totally not.
What you’re really doing is studying your competition’s social media techniques. But first, let me define competition here.
When I say competition, I don’t mean your opponent.
What I mean by competition is someone who creates similar content or has a similar business as you.
You’ll want to study someone who is more successful than you so that you can see what is working for them and see if you can learn from what they are doing.
For example, I “stalk” Kingdom Bloggers’ Pinterest account because she creates similar content as me and she’s been doing amazingly well.
So I study her account to see why she is resonating with her audience, how often she pins, the wording she uses on her pins, etc.
The “stalking” is more like admiration more than seeing your fellow blogger as a competitor.
This is important: While you are studying your “competitor’s” social media marketing skills, you are not copying their skills.
You need to be true to the calling that God has put on your heart.
I don’t think any of us would intentionally do that but I just wanted to be clear on what the purpose of this tip is.
We are studying and borrowing techniques but not the actual creativity or intellectual property of someone we admire.
3) Plan Your Social Media Content
So once you have taken a course and looked at bloggers with similar content or products, it’s time to start planning your content.
You can do this in many ways.
You can use Trello or another similar app. You can just freestyle your planning session by just using a blank sheet of paper.
But if you want your planning to be more guided then just a blank screen or piece of paper, you might consider using a social media planner printable.
The social media planner that I created has prompts that guide you through the entire draft of your post.
A good social media planner won’t just have spaces for you to write your social media post or just a blank space on a calendar for you to write down when you’ll schedule it.
A good social media planner will help you actually think through and plan the post in a way that helps you promote your blog.
It will help you be more strategic in your social media planning.
That’s how I designed my planner.
You can take a closer look at my planner here if you’re interested.
4) Practice What You’ve Learned
You know what they say…practice makes perfect.
If social media is not necessarily your forte but you really want it to be, the only way you will ever get better at it is to just do it and learn from your mistakes.
More than likely nothing catastrophic will happen once you start. Many posts are published and then forgotten pretty quickly (which is good and bad)…unless you go viral.
A great thing to do is to just schedule your content right after you plan it.
Create blog posts in bulk and then schedule with a scheduler like Buffer, Tailwind, or the free scheduler in Facebook, if that’s your social media platform of choice.
5) Be Consistent
This is probably the best piece of advice I can give you and it’s advice I struggle to follow but I know it’s good advice.
Be consistent.
Most blogger’s who are winning on social media (with comments, likes, shares, etc) are consistent.
They have a consistent style and they also have a consistent schedule.
They don’t post 5 times a day and then all of a sudden drop off the face of the earth for 2 months (guilty).
They are on their platform of choice publishing content on a consistent basis.
Universally, I believe all social media accounts reward those who use their platforms a lot.
As you can see, there are many different ways you can hone your social media skills.
If you start following these tips, before too long, you should start seeing more traffic, subscribers, and sales, if that is your goal.
The first thing I would do is find a course that will help you with your specific blogging goals.
If your goal is to get more email subscribers using social media then google that (social media course + subscribers) and see what comes up.
Or you can ask members in an appropriate Facebook group.
Then you would see what techniques are working for bloggers who are similar to you.
Then plan out your social media strategy using a social media planner.
You can get mine right here: Strategic Social Media Planner
Alright guys, thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you soon (virtually speaking, of course)
More Social Media Marketing posts from Christian Blogging Academy
How To Create A Successful Social Media Marketing Plan In 7 Steps
How To Use Facebook Groups To Promote Your Blog & Get More Traffic
(see, you’re already putting those social media skill to work :))
