3rd in a series of three
To properly promote your 
blog, you should spend four times longer promoting than writing the blog. So says Derek Halpern from Social Triggers, and with over 15,000 subscribers to his blog he knows what he’s talking about.
Blog promotion is fundamental to the success of your blog. Many of us spend so much time writing a blog we forget to promote it, when in fact that’s where we should be spending most of our time.
- Promote your blog through sharing.
Use social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to engage with people about your blog. Share your post on relevant LinkedIn and Google+ pages but make sure you’re an active member before doing this.
Email is another way to easily share. Email people in your company asking them to share the post. Include the blog in your newsletter and advertise it in your email signature line. These are all quick and effective ways to share and promote.
- Think about SEO before you even write your blog.
Optimise your how you write and the page you write it on. While your blog is still a fledgling idea you should be doing your research on other high ranking blogs on the same topic and seeing what keywords they have in common. You can do this with a tool called Adherfs, which shows you the links between the 10 top search results on your topic. Once the blog is written it’s also very important to boost your on-page SEO by using your keywords at the start of the title and mentioning them early in the opening paragraph.
- Some tools that will make your life easier and your blogging better.
– Mention.net – Another way to find your keywords so you can interact and engage with people and send them your content.
– Google alerts – Set up a Google alert about the topic you’re writing about so you can see what exactly other people are saying about it, what’s popular and who to engaging with once you’ve finished your blog.
– Google analytics – Is ideal for a quick, general idea of where your web traffic is coming from, what channels are driving the most visibility and conversions and has the added bonus of being free.
– Blog Engage – Allows you to connect with other like-minded bloggers and increase your blog’s reach.
– InboxQ – This tool helps you find questions that people are asking on Twitter and helps identify different keywords. It also notifies you when someone asks a question with your keyword so you can answer the question.
– Diigo – Allows you to highlight and store interesting content for quick retrieval later. This is useful when trudging through tonnes of research.
– Share – Make it easier to share by providing tools to share your blog.
– Email – Enable people to email your blog from within the blog.
– Site Feed – Turn on a site feed tool to allow people to track your blogs.
For something as simple as writing about an area you know about, blogging can become very daunting, very quickly. This is particularly true if you really want to get the most out of it and promote it. It’s important not to be overwhelmed by it and forget what a valuable resource blogging can be for B2B companies, as discussed in our last blog. It builds trust with your potential and current customers over what can be a long sales period through providing smart and honest content.
So that concludes our content marketing series; we hope you enjoyed it and happy blogging!