So, you’re writing a blog. That’s great, but only if people know it’s there. Many marketers and blog writers overlook the importance of a strategy to promote their corporate blogs. Here are five easy ways to tell the world about your blog:
1. Write interesting content
Your choice of content can help promote your blog, in and of itself. Make sure your blog writer is someone who can create interesting content that people want to read, talk about and share (more about sharing in Tip 2). A lot of people ask professional blog writers whether they recommend being controversial. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the answer is no, because controversy for the sake of it usually backfires. Only do it if you really feel controversy suits your brand. Most of the time, writing interesting, helpful content is the way to convert casual blog browsers to returning readers. Think about your target demographic, and write what they want to read. It’s really that simple.
2. Facilitate social bookmarking and sharing
If you have followed Tip 1 and your blog writer is posting well-written, helpful pieces of content, then readers are likely to want to share it on their social networking pages. They may also want to add your articles to their social bookmarking accounts, such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Make sure you facilitate this by including an appropriate sharing tool – such as AddThis or similar – in your blog interface.
3. Use your keywords consistently
Create a shortlist of your top keywords and make sure these appear regularly in the titles, body copy, anchor text links and tags of your blog posts. You don’t need to stuff every post full of keywords, but make sure that, over time, the search engines will find it easy to figure out what your corporate blog is all about and they’ll start sending more traffic your way.
4. Tie in with your other digital communications
A sound digital marketing strategy ties the company’s blog into its other digital communications. Your company’s e-newsletter and website should highlight recent blog posts. Likewise, if your company has social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook these should be utilised to announce latest blog posts. You could even ask your boss to make it company policy for everyone to include a link to the corporate blog in their email signatures.
5. Be a guest blogger
Look for complementary – but non-competing blogs – that are relevant to your target demographic, and offer them free articles in exchange for a credit and link back to your blog. Guest blogging carries two main benefits: first, the link back to your blog will be seen as a vote of confidence by search engines, which will have a positive impact on your own SEO efforts; additionally, the “host” blog will promote your article – and by extension your corporate blog – to its own readers, enabling you to piggyback onto this free publicity.
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