Hopefully the first four parts of this series have helped you successfully launch your business blog and you’ve gotten a few posts published and/or in the queue. Now it’s time to let the world know you’re here by promoting your content. If you’ve written your posts well using keywords and solid links your content will be easily found by web search. But you don’t want to rely on searches and “accidental landings” alone. If you want people to visit, you’ve got to send them an invitation!
Be a Social Butterfly – A social media butterfly, that is. If you are not using social media outlets for your business you are missing out on HUGE marketing and promotion potential. Most website/blog platforms have “social sharing” options available so that you can automatically post new blog entries to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more. It’s also important to include sharing options within your post so that readers may also share to their own networks and further promote your content. Again, this is an option within most website/blog platforms.
Rally the Troops – I’m willing to bet that you and members of your staff engage in social networking for business and/or personal reasons. Encourage your staff to promote content to their professional networking communities like LinkedIn.
In Part 2 of this series, I mentioned featuring your customers or using guest bloggers for content. Your customers and the guest bloggers have communities too. They can be major assets in promoting your business when they share the content that includes them.
Give Them a Sign – “Calls to Action” are what we call them in the marketing world and they are basically a “sign” to your visitors giving them direction and incentive to do what you want them to do. In this case, read a specific blog post. Creating an attractive graphic button and placing it on your website to entice visitors to take a peek is a great way to get your blog some attention.
Another excellent “call to action” is encouraging your visitors to subscribe to your blog. Just like social media sharing, most website/blog platforms are equipped to make this easy for you and your visitors. They can either subscribe via email and new posts will automatically go to their inbox or they can subscribe via RSS and new posts will be added to the web reader of their choice (Google Reader, Yahoo, etc.)
Send a Message – Email newsletters are an excellent way of promoting the news and events surrounding your business. If you are already using this method of marketing, be sure to include links to your latest and/or most relevant blog posts.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on the basics of business blogging. I know we’ve only scratched the surface here, but we just wanted to get you going. There will definitely be more on blogging and other marketing insights for your website and business.
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