Blogs are being posted all over the internet every second of the day and there are countless amounts of them just waiting to be read. With so much competition, it can seem like an impossible task to try and get your business blog to stand out from the crowd but there are various things you can do to raise awareness, get people talking about it and ultimately, increase the amount of traffic coming into the site.
Social media is a great source for promotion of, well, pretty much anything. Businesses have their own pages, parody accounts are set up, adverts are posted, the list goes on. Many other different methods are employed all in the name of getting the message out to the public and bringing them into the brand so how can you use social media to your advantage for the promotion of your blog?
The daddy of the social networking sites, Facebook has over one billion members and is one of the most successful social media platforms in existence. With that in mind, it is only logical that you would use it to your full advantage for the promotion of your blog. The easiest and simplest thing you can do is post a link to the blog on your own page and ask people to check it out and give you some feedback on it. Of course, in order to reach as many people as possible, you need to have a decent amount of Facebook friends or a page with a considerable number of likes.
Building up your following is something that takes time and won’t simply happen overnight. One of the first things you need to do is make sure you are engaging with the followers you do have. Write on their walls and comment on their statuses to show your friends that you are an active account and happy to chat. The information you post on your own page is just as important. Make it open-ended and encourage people to interact with you. Once this starts happening, you may find more people start adding you or liking your page, allowing you to post a link to your blog with the reassurance that it will be reaching a lot of people.
In some ways, Twitter is much more fast-moving that Facebook. Whereas Facebook tends to see people post once a day or even less frequently, Twitter is often full of users who post several times a day so you need to have a rather different strategy to ensure your blog is actually reaching the followers you want it to. Timing can be a lot more important with Twitter because it’s highly likely you’ll have followers from all over the world who will be logging on at different times. If you post blogs onto the same page every time, consider having a link to it in your biography on your page so that it’s always there for people to click on.
When you post a new blog, make sure you tweet a link to it and you may want to consider doing this more than once to ensure you reach all of your followers. Try tweeting it during the prime viewing time of your home-based followers and then again a couple of days later at a time when followers abroad will be most likely to see it. Ensure you add popular hashtags that are linked to the topic when you send your tweet. This will help the blog to show up in trends and when people search for this hashtag, your blog will come up in the results.
Outsource
Keeping up with several social media accounts can be hard work, particularly if you are trying hard to gain followers and want to get a lot of success out of them. In these circumstances, you may find it easier to outsource your social media services to an agency or a digital consultant. When you employ specialists to manage the account, you can then get back to the normal running of your business, knowing that someone else will ensure the necessary content is posted to your social media accounts.
Specialists will have the right training to know when is the best time to post your blogs, how to word the posts and even what sort of topics are likely to garner more attention. They also have contact with key influencers of various industries that can get involved in your blog. It may be that they comment on it or they could share it with their followers.
This sort of higher end interaction can result in your blog being seen by a considerably larger amount of people than if it had only been shared on your own account. Interaction and networking is essential when it comes to building a brand so bear this in mind at all times when trying to expand your reach.