Establishing a blog is large effort for anyone. Corporate blogs are especially challenging given multiple contributors and groups participating. Whether you’re an individual starting a blog, a start-up, mid-size company or large corporation the steps to promote follow the same path. Promotions for blogging and how you treat the blog are woven together. I’ll outline overarching promotions tactics you can employ to promote
your blog and gain wider visibility.
Create topically connected content – The most important part of your blog is the content. Write for the audience you want to target and create content relevant to them not you. David Mercer’s article in Social Media Today, “ Altruism makes cold hard business sense when it comes to social media” is great reference.
Frequency of Content – Frequency is important. There is no magic number here but, I would suggest 3 – 5 times per week is a good place to start. Do not overwhelm yourself. Start with 3 times a week and build up to a higher frequency. Remember, you are not a news provider. No one is expecting you to blog multiple times per day.
Employ SEO - SEO is extremely important and cannot be covered in this post. Make sure you have the basics covered: load time for your site, meaningful file names, mobile version, site navigation, titles to your pages and quality outbound links.
Quality inbound links to your site - Quality inbound links provide the “link juice” to get traffic. Cultivating links is the backbone of SEO. Inbound links, also known as backlinks, which are more significant contributor to SEO since search engines consider them a signal to relevance, Inbound links are hosted by other websites pointing to yours, which makes them hard to create and control. PageRank (PR) is a signal of authority exclusive to Google, is shared with outbound links. If a site with high PR links to your’s, some of that authority is inherited by association.
Social Media – Use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to promote your content. Grow and nurture your communities. Posting your blog links to Twitter only isn’t going to garner a lot of interest. Be diverse and part of the communities you decide to participate in.
Submit your posts to blogger sites – Check sites like Technaroti, Mashable, Alltop and others that are relevant to your industry and audience. Remember if your audience is individual investors or financial advisors Mashable isn’t going to work.
Email your posts – This seems redundant but you need to get your content in front of people. They aren’t going to always visit your blog — take the content to them. Make sure you employ a strong email service and be consistent. For example, if you choose Tuesdays as the day to email content and Friday as a roundup of the week stick to it. People will start to expect to see your content. MailChimp, Vertical Response and Emma all have reasonable inexpensive plans.
Press Releases - Use press releases to spread the word about your product and services. Many people wrongly assume that there isn’t much newsworthy happenings at their company, but there are always events that are a gold mine for information such as: new products, completions of projects, announcements of contracts, new partnerships, new personal, awards, industry whitepapers and interviews with company personnel.
Syndication - Syndication is under utilized and I’ll write a follow up post that focuses just on syndication. Find the top ten publishers in your industry that focus on your audience. Rank by site traffic and contact offline to find out how you can establish a relationship for your content to be featured.
Influencer Outreach - This is probably the most important part of your promotions efforts: targeting influencers in your industry. Establish a relationship, find out how you can help them, comment on their blogs and then ask if they would be interested in guest blogging for you. Remember, to do something for them first and ask second.
