Your blog can be one of the greatest referrers of qualified traffic to your business and help boost engagement, brand awareness, and loyalty. Knowing how to promote your blog is a big part of the process, and below there are four easy ways that you can start getting your blog working for you.
Have a Digital Communications Strategy
The adage fail to plan, plan to fail definitely applies to your social and content marketing initiatives. If you want to achieve measurable results and outcomes, and really use the platforms to grow your business, you need to be working towards goals as part of a greater strategy. If you’re not sure how to plan or implement this strategy, consider engaging a digital agency like Market Smartly to help you put an actionable plan in place.
Tell People About Your Blog
Most people get that they need to include links to their blog in their newsletters and on their social media pages, but do your customer service staff know about the blog and actively recommend people visit it for more information about your business and industry? Often, there is a disconnect between offline and online customer interaction; not linking the two can mean you miss opportunities.
Use Your Affiliates
Think about other businesses and/or suppliers who offer complementary products or services to yours. Can they write a guest post or regularly contribute information to a column that can then be promoted to their audience? Not only do these joint venture style approaches give value to your established audience, they can also help you to connect with new readers and potential customers as well.
Make It Easy for People to Share Your Content
There are simple – and often free or low cost – plug-ins or applications that you can use to enable social sharing on your blog posts. If you are creating an amazing info-graphic or piece of valuable content, you are limiting your reach if your readers can pin it, share it, or re-tweet. When people find relevant and engaging content, their automatic reaction is to tell their friends about it; having these add-on features will allow them to do it much more easily.
Bonus Tip: Get The Design & Technical Aspects Right
It’s essential that your blog design supports your brand. It needs to work on mobile and tablet devices, as well as desktops and laptops. Above all else, it needs to work the way you and your audience expect it to. It can be tempting to just get started and worry about the details as you grow your audience, but this approach can actually do you a disservice because people won’t engage with content they can’t use properly. Any marketing activities you’re doing in the meantime may be lost if the experience people have when following your call to action is lacking.
When it comes to successful blogging, it’s not just a case of build it and they will come – you need to be reaching out and networking to build long term relationships that will help your blog (and business) thrive.
What’s your best blog marketing tip?
