Imagine planning a great party. You pick out a date and time for your soirée. You get the perfect venue secured and then dive into putting together a mouthwatering menu for your guests. Then, there are the decorations to consider. And what about invitations? All of the energy and time in planning this celebration would go to waste if you forget to invite people. After all, what is a party without guests?
Many companies spend tireless hours planning, prepping, and writing their blog, but forget one critical step: promoting it! A successful promotion plan serves an invitation for people to read, engage, subscribe, and follow your blog. If you’re just getting started on your blog journey, check out my previous post, 4 Building Blocks of Launching a Successful Blog.
Once you have your “party” (aka your blog) planned, then proceed onward for some promotion tips.
Start Internally
Your company is the perfect place to start promoting your blog. Make sure your employees, partners, and members are aware of the valuable insights being delivered in your blog. Here are a few things to do internally:
- Consider a soft launch to garner interest before launching to the greater public
- Add a link to the blog in employees’ email signatures
- Encourage your staff to subscribe to the blog
- Ask employees to help generate online discussion by publicly commenting on your blog, perhaps adding additional insight
Getting your members or employees to engage with the blog helps to enlist them as brand ambassadors, turning them into a valuable asset for spreading your message far and wide.
Get Social
Social media is an ideal tool to amplify your blog. There are so many channels to share your blog; you should definitely take advantage of this opportunity! A good first step is to make sure all your social media profiles include a link to your blog. Making it easier for readers to share your content is important, so don’t forget to include social sharing buttons on your blog itself. When leveraging social media to promote your blog, here are some things to consider:
- Use images, videos, and compelling content
- Don’t just share the headline of the blog; provide a key takeaway to encourage higher clickthrough rates
- Share your posts immediately after publishing, and continue to re-share them
- Check your web stats and re-promote popular blogs
- Encourage employees or members to share the blogs from their own social media accounts
Engage Your Readers
Most companies use their blog as another entry point for people to engage with their company or organization. In order to capture your blog visitors, you need clear calls to action (CTAs). Effective CTAs include:
- Ask readers to connect or follow you on your social media accounts
- Embed a “Tweet This” widget that enables one-click sharing of a pre-written tweet from your blog, and be sure to create multiple opportunities for people to “Tweet This” throughout your article
- Provide multiple opt-in subscription forms throughout the blog and elsewhere on your website to get people to subscribe; do make sure your site and email marketing system is set up to automatically alert subscribers when new blogs are posted
- Consider using a slide-in subscribe form instead of a pop-up, as it serves as an useful means of offering additional information while still allowing your blog post to be read
- Encourage people to comment on posts to get a conversation going and build sense of community. Pro tip – set up a login feature so only those who are logged in can comment. This will help prevent bot entries from clogging up your approval queue.
Hit Your Readers’ Inboxes
There are approximately 3.7 billion email users around the world, making email marketing a good option to promote your blog. For an effective email marketing campaign, you need to develop your list. By providing clear CTAs to subscribe to your blog via social media, internal company announcements, and pop-ups or slide-ins on your blog, you can start to build your subscribers list. When promoting your blog via email marketing here are a few considerations:
- Email your list each time a new blog is published
- Make sure your email includes an effortless way for subscribers to share the blog with their circle of influence
- Consider an email newsletter with a round up of popular or recent posts
- Use relevant blog articles as educational content in your follow up drip campaigns with inbound prospects
Spend Some Money
Paid promotion is another opportunity to grow your audience with targeted ads on social media and search engines. While you may be tempted to stay away from ads for fear of expense, there are options that allow you to have complete control over your budget and keep it affordable. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all offer paid ad opportunities, and Google or Bing search ads are also useful options to consider investing in. A few things to think about when putting together ads include:
- Research and develop a target audience
- Keep copy short and compelling with a clear CTA
- Use engaging images or video
- Eliminate extra clicks; the ad link should take the reader directly to the blog or post the ad is referring to
Target Keywords
Organic search is still one of the biggest sources of traffic for most websites. People hop on over to Google to search for just about everything, so targeting keywords to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your blog is important. Keywords are the crux of SEO, so here are things to remember when writing content for your blog:
- Start with keyword research to find out what terms people are using when they search
- Include the top keywords in your blog
- Optimize your posts for the keyword by using it in your page title tag, meta description, main headline, and throughout the blog post…but do it naturally so that your posts don’t appear spammy to Google
These are just a few examples of tactics you could use to promote your blog, but for optimal success, you’ll want to take advantage of multiple promotion tactics. Use them as a shiny invitation to get more people to read, engage, and subscribe to your blog today. And for more expert insights to help you take things to the next level, check out our free Interprose Essentials Guides on blogging.
