Like many digital resources, blogging is often misunderstood. Whilst in its most basic form it is simply the production of content to be published online, there is such a lot more to go with it that it often comes as a huge surprise to our clients when we start to talk about our business blogging services, particularly our full strategies.
Starting by producing high quality, unique, customer focused content, the aspect that many fail to fully understand is the promotional side. Yes, if you left your blog alone and simply published content on it regularly you would see visitors, but you can greatly enhance the number you receive by carrying out a range of different processes and activities.
Utilising social media, for example, can be a fantastic way to instantly increase the reach of your blog posts, but there are a number of other great ways, too. Some are quite well-known in the blogging industry, whilst others may be completely new to you, with these five being a selection of both.
1. Include the latest link within your e-mail signature
Let’s imagine you have 100 employees in your organisation. Each employee sends five external e-mails every day, meaning 2,500 e-mails are sent out every week to external individuals.
Or if you look at it another away, 2,500 opportunities to promote your latest blog post.
A relatively easy process, integrating your blog’s feed into your e-mail signature means that you instantly put your blog post in front of an audience that is very likely to be at least partly interested in what you have to say – and that’s without doing anything other than sending your normal e-mails.
2. Automatically push to active social media groups
We consider social media an integral part of our business blogging strategies and one of the most simple yet effective parts is the automatic push of new blog posts to social media.
Particularly effective for those organisations who want to remain active on social media themselves, by ensuring your blog and social media accounts ‘talk’ to each other, you can concentrate on engaging with your audience and not have to worry whether your content is being promoted – it will happen automatically upon it going live.
3. Engage with other bloggers
Over time your blog will develop a loyal audience, full of people who will return time and time again to read the content you publish. Whilst this will happen naturally, it can be extremely beneficial to reach out and engage with other bloggers and their audiences.
Researching similar blogs within your industry, by simply commenting on other blog posts regularly, you’ll find that your engage with both the blogger and the readers of the blog, something that will lead people to want to take a look at your own content.
Plus, it can also help to build great relationships with the bloggers, something that can be extremely beneficial when considering guest blog posting.
4. Become a voice of authority in suitable forums
You may think that forums are a thing of the past now that we have the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but there are still numerous extremely active forums out there, with at least a handful in most industries.
If you can become a regular contributor to discussions in a forum, by using your signature to display your blog’s details, every time you make a comment, your blog will be advertised – and it will remain advertised unless your comment or the thread gets deleted.
Forums don’t usually use the ‘follow’ attribute on links, so they won’t be of value in terms of SEO, but one or two hundred comments in an active forum over the course of a few months provides advertising for your blog, as well as increasing your company’s reputation as a thought leader and voice of authority.
5. Talk about topics that are actually of interest
A blog is a platform upon which you can communicate with your target audience. It allows you to talk about, in theory, any topic you wish, although it obviously makes the most sense to discuss topics related to your industry.
It might sound like a simple point, but the more attractive and enticing your blog posts are, the more people are likely to read them. It’s the same with the topics and subjects your blog posts revolve around – if you can tie in something that’s being talked about in the news or an event which has happened recently, you’ll find more people come across your blog posts as more people are reading about those subjects in general.
Your blog will naturally develop over time without any other form of input, but when you have a potential audience of millions out there, it makes complete commercial sense to understand how you can engage with them to ensure they read your blog posts and interact with your organisation online.
More to read
- Can You Really Afford To Keep Your Business Blogging In-House?
- 5 Ways To Get More People Reading Your Blog Posts
- Should You Integrate Your Business Blog Within Your Company Website?
- The Halo Effect, Brand Strength And Business Blogging
- How Far In Advance Should You Schedule Your Business’s Blog Posts?
- How Often Should Your Business Blog’s Data Be Analysed?
- When Should You Start Your Business Blog?
- 3 Things You Need To Know When Looking For Blog Post Ideas
- The Importance Of Research Before Production When It Comes To Blog Post Content
- When A Global Issue Is Dominating Headlines, Should Your Business Blog About It?