Blogging for your small business is a low cost (essentially free) marketing tool for your business. By merely supplying useful information to your target audience, you can earn the trust of potential customers and distinguish your business from your competitors. In order to get the most out of blogging for your small business , you need to promote it! The more people who see it, the more your blog can help your business to get customers, increase brand awareness, showcase its expertise, and increase its website traffic. This post will go over how to use social media and other existing marketing channels to promote your business blog.
Promoting Your Small Business Blog with Social Media
Social Media Posts
One of the easiest but most effective ways to promote your small business blog is through social media posts . Promote your blog with a post that includes a link to the blog post and some context. This could be a short description of what the post is about, a comment on what readers will get out of it, or a stat, quote or fact from the post that will intrigue readers. Sometimes the title itself will do. On Twitter, you’ll have less characters to work with, so it’s best to go with either the title of the blog post or a very brief description. You may also want to use link shorteners like bit.ly to conserve characters.
Posts with Pictures
When you use social media to promote your blog, social media posts containing pictures typically will get more engagement. If your blog post already has a picture, most platforms will automatically render the picture once you paste the link into the post. If you don’t have a picture for your blog post, check out our post on small business blogging basics to find tools that can help you. If it does not automatically render (Twitter does not have this feature, and sometimes it doesn’t work on other platforms), you can manually upload one.
Sharing Buttons
Not only should you promote your business blog on social media, you should also encourage readers to promote your blog as well. They can do this by reposting or retweeting your posts, but they can also do this on their own too. Organic shares like this may carry more weight since the reader shared the post on their own accord, and can help to increase your social media engagement.
The key to getting readers to share your blog on their own is to make it as easy as possible for readers. Insert social sharing buttons directly into your blog posts. You can even use Click-to-Tweet to pre-write an interesting or attention grabbing Tweet for the reader, that they can share right from your post with just one click (or tap).
Hashtags
Social media is a great way to get more traffic to your blog and give your blog more visibility than publishing alone. Hashtags can further extend your reach, and to the right audience as people may find your blog post by searching hashtags relevant to their needs and interests. When you promote your posts on social media, use related hashtags so that more than just your followers can discover your posts.
Groups
Another way to use social media to promote your business blog is through groups and forums that are related to your business. Supplying useful content is a great way to start, add to, or join the conversation. However, make sure that are consistently active and equally interactive in these groups. If you only join the conversation to promote your content, but don’t engage with or acknowledge group members otherwise, you are likely to lose favor in the group. This not only defeats the purpose of a group but also comes off as self serving, which goes against social media best practices. For some groups, it might be best to wait until you’ve been active in the group for a while before promoting your own content.
Micro-Influencers
A micro-influencer is someone in either your local or industrial community that has an influence on your target market. They’re not world famous, but they are well known, trusted, and closely followed on social media by concentrated audiences, also known as niche markets. You can use micro-influencers with popular blogs and social media accounts to promote your blog in a number of ways. For example:
• The micro-influencer could write a guest post for your blog.
• The micro-influencer could link to one of your blog posts in their blog post.
• You could write a guest post for their blog. Typically, blogs that have guest writers will include a bio of that writer with a link to their main blog.
Collaborating with micro-influencers will promote your blog by expanding your reach to their target audience, and granting it exposure to more people that could be interested in your business.
Other Ways to Promote Your Small Business Blog
Business Cards
You can also use business cards to promote your small business blog. You may just want to put your business website on there, and then make your blog easy to identify and navigate to from your homepage. However, if you put your blog on there as a separate entity, you are showing that you take pride in your blog and treat it separately from your website. If it’s important enough to you to put it on your business card, people may be more inclined to visit it.
Your Blog
Did you know that your blog can promote your blog? In addition to making your blog stand out with engaging content and powerful visuals, you should also include links to other posts in your blog articles, to create a network of information. If you mention something in a post that readers might want to know more about or not be familiar with, but you have an existing post on that subject, you can link the text right to that article. This keeps readers on your blog longer, and shows them that your knowledge goes beyond just this one post.
You can always go back and include links to new posts in your old posts. In fact, this process facilitates ideas for additional blog posts. For example, if you find yourself mentioning a particular concept, product, or service in your blog posts, it might be worth writing a separate blog post on that topic that you can go back and link your posts to. The more information readers can get from your blog, the more you can become a go to resource for them and show yourself as an expert in your field.
Blog for SEO
Another way that your blog can promote itself is to optimize it for search. Write blog posts not just on topics related to your business, but on topics that potential customers are interested in or searching for. Keep in mind that you may need to simplify your language a bit. For example, people may not necessarily know to search for “geothermal heating systems” but they might type in “green plumbing” or “energy efficient heating. Catering your content for topics and words that people are searching for will promote your blog by enabling it to get found by more people.
Blog Directories
There are a number of directories online that serve as a search engine for blogs and can help you to promote yours. These directories help people to find and filter blogs that are relevant to them with respect to location or topic. Just be sure to find out if there are any fees associated with getting listed, and to verify that the directory is a credible resource.
A blog may be free, but it does cost you your time to write posts. By promoting your blog, on social media and through other marketing channels, you are increasing the return on the investment of your time, and letting more people know the value you have to offer.
