Your team is blogging regularly. Your business blog volume is way up. Google search spiders are starting to notice so organic page results are improving. But alas! Your blog readership numbers and subscriptions remain frustratingly low.
Now here's the kicker — the yeoman's work you put in to coordinate, manage and produce all that fantastic content — is only the beginning. Now the heavy lifting must begin to build and maintain a loyal audience.
Here are some blog promotion strategies for beginners that will help you build your audience, provided you stick to it and put in the time:
Be a Guest Blogger
Identify team members that have the experience, track record and writing skills that would be attractive to another blog. Then, reach out to well-read blogs, high traffic websites, local, high-profile businesses or any other blog that will give your business exposure.
Becoming a regular guest blogger for a highly-regarded business or information resource will build your blog's credibility, position your writers as thought leaders, improve how Google rates your website for search and produce backlinks to your website.
What's a backlink, you ask?
Backlinks
A backlink is simply a link to your website that lives on another website. For example, let's say you earn a guest blogger slot for the American Marketing Association. When your blog gets posted on their site, any links back to your website that are embedded in the blog become backlinks. Here's how backlinks work, from a 40,000 foot perspective:
- Obtaining a backlink from a website that is rated highly by Google is digital gold for increasing search position and blog readership.
- The more that strong and well-regarded websites link to your site, the more it will help your search page positioning.
- Stronger organic search results and new traffic generated through backlinks are sure to increase readership levels.
Now, obtaining great backlinks is not easy. There is a ton of competition. It might be best to start by pitching your writers/blog locally. Yes, that's right--you'll need to make calls, send emails and proactively promote why another site should pick your content over that of others.
In many cases, getting those first few backlinks are the toughest. Once you have a "resume" of backlinks and guest blogs, you can use that to your advantage when you seek future backlink opportunities.
Good ol' email. It's still a very useful tool for putting your blog out in front of your audience.
First, you'll have to do some work building your email list. If you have a few hundred emails already, start pushing out an email a month that features your latest and greatest piece of blog content. Every other monthly send an "In Case You Missed It" newsletter style email that recaps several months of strong blog posts.
Putting your blogs front-and-center in email campaigns will certainly help drive up your blog readership numbers.
Push Social Media
Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media outlets as another set of blog promotion strategies:
- Build a social media calendar that supports your blog posts.
- Schedule blog-focused Tweets; post your blog to appropriate LinkedIn forums or groups; promote your blog on your Facebook business page.
- Pay to "boost" your blog-focused social media posts to kick start your readership campaign.
- Make sure social share buttons are placed in highly visible areas of your blog and promotional efforts.
Create Great Content
Without compelling, entertaining and valuable content, any and all blog promotion strategies will fall flat. It's really that simple. Start by refining and developing awesome blog content. Then push it out to the world and see what comes back.
Track your results. If the blogs flop, use the data you've collected to determine a new course of action until you get it right.
Then promote away.
If you're looking for assistance getting your blog to the next level, reach out. We'd love to listen to your challenges and ideas and augment them with our own. We're here to help businesses just like yours.