Promoting Your Business Blog
Adding a business blog to your site can be an effective way to improve your search engine visibility, but simply having a blog - even a very active one - isn’t enough. Here are a few business blogging strategies to consider.
Business blogging is a planned activity. Personal blogs may leave you with the impression that blogging is a stream-of-consciousness, no-rules game, with no purpose other than to publish the author’s thoughts. Business blogging is different. It employs a specific strategy to deliver a message to the target audience. Visitors may happen to run across your blog while they’re looking for something else, but your blog should be ready to deliver your message all the time. By carefully focusing your business blog on your message, interested readers are more likely to find your blog and your site.
Have something of substance to say. This goes along with planning your message. Your readers are giving you something of value: time. Make the most of the opportunity you’re given by returning something of value to them. The nature of your business and the message you want to send will determine your blog content. “Valuable” blog entries could be product reviews, observations that draw on your experience in your field, how-to tips, good resource lists or anything else that gives your reader something of value and promotes your message at the same time.
Offer a new perspective. You can also add value to your business blog by offering your readers a new perspective on a subject of interest. You can add value to your blog, keep your readers interested, and improve your search engine visibility by offering food-for-thought. Challenging the conventional wisdom on a subject related to your business, letting your readers share the benefit of your experiences, or suggesting a new approach to a known problem can invigorate a discussion and invite readers into the subject and into your business community.
Respond to comments and questions. Readers like being part of the conversation, so be prepared to read and respond to their comments and questions. When you respond to their comments, you develop a relationship with the commenter and you let readers know that you’re interested in what they have to say.
Promote your blog! Email can be an effective promotional tool for your blog. You may use your Web site to collect contact information from your visitors. This can be a great starting point for promoting your blog. Chances are good that your site visitors have registered their contact information, they’re interested in what you’re doing, showing or selling on your site. You already have an established relationship with these visitors. Why not use it? If you send out a promotional email, identify yourself and be sure to indicate to the recipient that they’re a registered visitor on your site. Don’t forget to use the signature space on your outgoing email to promote your blog’s URL.
Link to relevant sites. A link is just a link unless it takes a visitor somewhere relevant. Avoid creating links that take your reader somewhere unrelated to your blog’s focus. Likewise, links from other relevant sites will improve your blog’s search engine visibility. To help the process along, use your blogroll to create a list of blogs that relate to yours. You’ll make your blog easier to find, you’ll add value to your blog for your readers, and you’ll build your business community by showcasing related sites that you like.
Comment on other blogs. As part of the blogging community, you should feel comfortable commenting on other blogs that are related to yours. By making thoughtful comments, you can elevate the visibility of your own commentary, add value to another blogger’s discussions, and draw interested readers back to your site or blog. As members of the community become familiar with you, they will come to appreciate the contribution you make to the discussion.
Make it easy for your readers to find you. Use sites like Feedburner to republish your RSS feed and make it widely available to potential readers. Each time you make a change to the content on your blog, other blog search engines and your blog readers will learn about the new material. You can also add features to your blog that make it easy for readers to pass along a blog item to others, mark it as a favorite, or distribute it to a much larger audience on a site like Digg, or del.icio.us. Use several distribution sites for your blog. The more exposure you give your blog, the more you improve your chances of reaching interested readers.
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