Small business entrepreneurs know that one of the toughest parts of trade is getting your name out to the public. One way to get name recognition is to actively advertise your blog.
A blog is a great way to keep in touch with clients and consumers, keeping them up-to-date with the latest news and happenings in your business. There are several steps you can take to broaden the range of blog readers using social networking and specialized tools.
1. Optimize blog posts for your target keywords. You may know your business off the back of your hand, but do you know what your customers are searching for? Use Google Adwords keyword research tool to get an idea of what your target customrs are searching for online.
2. Enhance your blog functionality with the power of plugins and themes. WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform, and if you are not using WordPress software for your blog, you may want to consider it, since it’s free, and you can leverage numerous plugins to turbo-charge your blog power.
You will definitely need a contact form plugin, like Contact Form 7 or Cforms II. If you are already using customer relationship management software (CRM), you might want to consider using something like the WordPress-to-Lead CRM plug-in.
Readers enter their contact information on your blog site, and the information goes directly into your CRM software without your having to do any cutting and pasting. CRM helps you manage your customer interactions in ways a contact manager or email cannot.
There’s an abundance of business and cororate themes you can use to add to your professional image with a clean, elegant look. A few you can choose from are:
You can always do a simple Google search to find more corporate themes to fit the image of your company.
3. Make your blog social. No blog would be complete without a Social Share plugin, like Sociable, which allows your visitors to share your post on a multitude of social media sites, enabling the viral distribution of your content through Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, etc.
4. List your blog in blog directories. SEO copywriting is great, but your blog also needs links. Links are the currency of the web and help your search engine rankings.
While it’s best to get a diversified range of links over time, you will have to start somewhere, and listing your blog in various blog directories is always a good start.
5. Participate in other blogs in your niche. Social media is about community and conversation. A great way to get found is to regularly visit and comment on other blogs in your niche. You can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site if you do this right.
Google Alerts is a great way to get notified of new blog posts related to your niche. Rather than scour the web for related blogs, kick back and let Google Alerts do the work for you.
6. Tap into the power of Google Analytics. Another way to ramp up your marketing strategies is to analyze who is viewing your page. By analyzing the site statistics, you might see a pattern developing. There might be certain days of the week or times of the month that are more popular than others. Knowing this, you can add a blog posts at strategic times, drawing in more business. You might also notice that there are particular topics that receive more hits than others.
Business blogging is a great way to market your company, drive traffic, and engage your customers. Using specialized marketing tools for blogs not only makes your site more interactive, but it helps you get your business name out there.
Wow first time I dig into a list of tips and I find out I already apply all of them.
Nice ones anyway, especially the use of social plugins, it’s impressive the amount of blogs using just – and not even always – a simple Retweet button without Digg or Stumbleupon integration.
If you manage to keep not too invasive, I think social plugins are fundamental, I couldn’t stress this more.
That’s good to hear and I absolutely agree with you about the social plugins. You have to promote a blog post in as many ways as possible these days and supplying buttons for your readers to use should be second nature.