After spending time brainstorming, writing, and optimizing the perfect blog posts to promote your business, you might be wondering, “Why haven’t I seen any results yet?” Spending the time to craft engaging content for prospective customers is important, but so is putting in the time to promote your blog. To get the most out of your blogging, you need to be prepared to also spend time creating and cultivating promotional channels for your blog. If promoting your blog is not yet a part of your marketing strategy, we’ll show you how and where to promote it for free.
Whether you have a robust social media presence, a sizable email list, access to a website designer, or not many resources at all, this article will have ideas to boost your blog’s visibility and increase traffic to your site. The key to successfully promoting your blog is to find a marketing channel that will align with your needs and resources, so that you can market your business more efficiently.
So how and where can you promote your business blog?
There are two ways to promote your blog- you can work to gain exposure for your blog itself or you can promote individual blog posts. There are advantages to both approaches.
Promoting individual blog posts can bring your business a lot of exposure but is also much more time consuming. Sharing individual posts on social media platforms also gives you the ability to experiment with different social media platforms and allows you to see which marketing channels’ audience is the most responsive to your business. For example, if your blog posts are getting more engagement on a niche content sharing platform like Scribd than on Facebook, it is a good indication of which platform you should invest more resources in. If you’re looking for different ideas for where to promote your blog, download our Blogging for Business 101 guide.
If you don’t have time to promote individual blog posts, the second approach is to promote the blog itself. First, be sure to list your blog’s URL on your business’s marketing literature, website, social media platforms, as well as using it as a part of your email signature. Although you can start promoting your blog to your team, family, and friends even before any posts are written- it’s more effective to promote a blog that already has a couple posts rather than sending visitors to a webpage with no content. Make an announcement on all your social media profiles about your new blog and encourage your team to share the news on their profiles as well.
Promoting Your Blog on Social Media
Did you know that social media sharing could accelerate the success of your blog and increase your ranking in search engines like Google? Sharing blog posts on social media should be a key component of your blog promoting strategy. If you’re limited on time, installing social media sharing plugin or an RSS Feed plugin will expedite the process.
If you have more time or know which social media platform your audience is more engaged on, then here are a list of strategies and ideas for various online marketing channels to promote your blog on.
Promoting Your Blog on Facebook
Share your blog posts on both your personal Facebook page and your business’s Facebook page (if you have one). If you don’t have a Facebook business page yet, read this article on how to start one. Write a short teaser description or share an interesting and relevant statistic to capture your audience’s attention, followed by your blog post’s URL. A short description of your blog post is much more effective in grabbing your audience’s attention than posting a long excerpt from your blog. This technique also optimizes your Facebook posts for your mobile smartphone audience.
If you do have both a personal and a business Facebook page, be sure to post your content to your business’s page first and then share that post to your personal Facebook profile. Increase the organic reach of your Facebook posts by tagging users on social media. When you share the post from your business page to your personal page rather than posting your content twice and separately, it’ll give your post a viral boost- increasing your business page’s visibility.
Promoting Your Blog on LinkedIn
Unlike Facebook, you don’t necessarily need to create a business page on LinkedIn to be able to promote your content effectively. Creating a LinkedIn page for your business will take time and resources to maintain. It’s also much more difficult to grow an engaged LinkedIn group following.
One of the advantages of LinkedIn is the access you have to business communities in your region as well as around the country through LinkedIn interest groups. If you haven’t already joined LinkedIn groups, be sure to read the best practices on how to find relevant groups to engage with in our LinkedIn for Business guide. There are three approaches you can take to promoting your business blog on LinkedIn.
Start by promoting to your personal LinkedIn network- share your blog or your blog posts on your LinkedIn status. Through this strategy, your LinkedIn network will be the only ones to see your posts.
A second, more proactive approach is to join LinkedIn groups where your target market could be found and post your content as a new discussion. Try joining a combination of groups to test where you can garner the most attention for the type of content you’re promoting. You can join local groups, big industry groups, target market groups, or alumni groups. Write an attractive title or pose a question in the discussion topic (200 character limit) along with a short description (summarize your blog post down into skimmable and digestible bullet points).
Lastly, engage with potential customers on a more personal level. One of the advantages of joining LinkedIn groups are the daily emails rounding up trending or new group discussions. Answer trending questions or join in on active discussions to promote your expertise. Focus on nurturing your relationships by first offering advice and then redirecting them to your business’s webpage by posting a link from your blog instead of a hard sales pitch. Participating in active and trending discussions will increase the likelihood that prospective customers will see your comments.
Promoting Your Blog on Twitter
Unlike LinkedIn and Facebook’s newsfeeds, Twitter’s newsfeed stream moves extremely quickly. Within an hour of posting on Twitter, your tweet can already be buried from your audience’s stream. Ideally, if you’re promoting a blog post and have the time to execute this strategy, tweet a short description of you blog post along with its URL several times throughout the day.
If your Twitter following is small, increasing the frequency of your content pushes may not help get your content discovered. Two other ways to get your content found is using hashtags to promote your blog posts or tweet at industry influencers by tagging them on Twitter.
Promoting Your Blog on Pinterest
Out of all the social media platforms, Pinterest has the reputation for its ability to drive traffic offsite- thus increasing traffic to your blog. Since it’s a visual content sharing network, create an attractive image to promote your blog post with. Take an interesting statistic or a quotable sentence and use a tool like Picmark or Pinstamatic to create engaging images for your boards. Make sure the title of your blog post is apparent on the image you’ve created and add keywords to the description. For more Pinterest marketing tips for business, check out this post.
Promoting your Blog on Google +
Use Google + to promote your blog for added SEO benefits. Share your blog posts with your circles and publicly on your Google + profile as well. If you don’t have a Google+ page for your business, set one up. If you’re cross promoting your blog posts on Twitter, you can use the same hash tag strategy for both platforms.
Check out this more free marketing ideas. After going through the more common marketing channels, you can continue to promote your blog on blog directories, other industry blogs and forums, niche networking sites, meet up groups and much much more. The more platforms or sites your blog post is on, the more likely that people will see it and the more it benefits your site’s ranking.
Besides the top social media networks, there are several other sites (with rapidly growing user bases) like that are great for distributing different types of articles, depending on where your target audience is. If you’re limited on time like most small business owners, focus on publishing blog posts regularly, optimizing your blog posts for SEO to increase organic traffic, and promoting your posts through the more commonly used marketing channels that we mentioned in the article.
Image credit: hgjohn
