Marketing Advice - Blogging

Re Publishing helpful content on your blog that you have found useful - it could be if you found someone particularly helpful like a ‘marketing consultant' (why thank you) or a particular blog, supplier, software, office product, tradesman, even a blog on another blogger and why you liked their blog (don't forget to link back to the original post) or a social media platform you like or don't like. Mix it up with other topics though, you don't want it become stale or predictable.

Try and think about what people are searching for. It might be a headline ‘How Twitter works for me' or if you found a local tradesman useful it could be ‘Business lesson from a Plumber' and then a blog about that, I'm just thinking of these on the fly but take some time with it and you will figure out what works over time.

You are trying to play a mix of search and content. Be interesting, be helpful, be found, be funny, be controversial but don't be boring and shameless self promoting. Once you have a decent number of subscribers that is when you start shifting your focus a bit.

Here is some general marketing advice regarding blogging.

• Be patient

• The important (nay... EXTREMELY Important) thing is always the headline (make it search engine friendly - think keywords - and attention grabbing, ‘Yachts and Strippers' is a good thing but you might not get the readers you want) as this is what people see first and will make people decide whether to read/open it or not. Then of course it's got to have good content (with keywords you want to appear for in Google) to make them read it and subscribe if they are new.

• Be patient

• When writing content think about.... is this interesting enough to make people tell other people about it by linking to it (which is what you really want). In the early days concentrate just on finding your own writing style but as you get more confident and experienced try to think about how you can get others to talk about your blog and link to it.

• Be patient

• Create say 3 blogs before posting others so you can always be ahead of yourself.

• Be patient

• Subscribe to blogs of others in your industry. Type in Google the phrase that best describes your industry and select and follow the interesting ones. Make time to read them. Study and learn what is good from the popular ones (sometimes you can see how many subscribers they have)

• Be patient

• Make sensible and helpful contributions on comments on other peoples blogs remembering to put a link to your blog at the bottom along with your name. Don't self promote just add value in the comments. Even if it is a thank you for some helpful information your read in it. Don't just put ‘thank you' though it looks spammy.

• Be patient

• Ask your customers (or suppliers) to be a guest poster

• Be patient

• Market your blog and its content through email, RSS and SM. But DON'T be spammy, add value to others, post helpful comments or even be direct (rather than spammy) and ask for peoples thoughts (via SM and email or even god forbid snail mail) on your blog. This is difficult and it takes a real man to ask for criticism ;)

• Be patient

• Try to make friends with some people who write blogs in your industry (if they are not direct competitors obviously) and build up SM friendship by being a regular (and hopefully interesting and humorous) contributor to their blog. Sometimes its not what you are doing with your own efforts that will get you the best results. The holy grail of blogging (and websites) is getting backlinks (links to your blog or website) from high ranked blogs or pages. All you need is one Highly Ranked SM friendly type that you have been contributing to their blog to write something nice about you in another blog and you could possibly get 1000's of unique visits and then the rest is up to you.

• Be patient

• Answer peoples questions on LinkedIn (make sure you are correct when answering) and have a link to your blog on your LinkedIn profile and your other SM channels.

• Be patient

• You want your blog to drive traffic to your website and be a centre point of your industry where people don't just visit once but keep coming back. A blog is used for 2 main purposes (there others such as positioning yourself as an expert etc) either to drive traffic to your website which will in turn lead to enquiries or to make money from the advertising on it or the products you promote in it. While you have very little followers don't try and use it to make money from advertising or products. A blog shouldn't just be an advertisement for your product. You need to strike a balance and in the early days all you should be bothered about is getting readers and subscribers by creating great excellent content.

• Be patient

• Monitor traffic to your blog and find out when visitors peak and why was it. Has someone from a high Google ranking page linked to you or was it that you put it on twitter or was the headline particularly controversial or funny. Learn from these for future posts.

• Be patient

• Do not turn on the moderate comments sections on your website (this can be disconcerting but it just creates another barrier). Let people comment freely without delays as sometimes a controversial comment can lead to it getting a lot more exposure. Also make sure you answer questions left on your comments and even make comments on other peoples comments.

• Be patient

• Learn how to use Digg and StumpleUpon (too big a subject to cover here)

• Be patient

• Write down you blog in rough/draft form and then leave it for a few hours (maybe overnight) and in the same way that when you can't remember the name of that song and it suddenly comes to you the next day your subconscious will be working on the ideas of your blog for you.

• Oh...... and be patient!!!

I hope the marketing advice here can help in your blogging activity.

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