You have just poured your heart and soul into creating the perfect blog post for your website. You have found beautiful graphics to illustrate your major points. You have posted it to your website. Now, you have just a few more tasks to check off your list because no blog post can be considered complete until you have promoted it. After all, you want the world to know about the business blog that you have just created.
When you think about business-to-business blog promotion there are several different factors that you need to keep in mind. Think about how you are going to connect your blog to various groups like shareholders, executives, and lower-level management who will be using the product. Double check that you have included data-driven charts and graphs as they are vital to blog marketing. Think about how you are going to keep your blog promotion going over time as many corporations have long sales cycles. Here are five specific ideas that you may want to employ.
Add Links
The first thing that you need to do is add some links to your article. Think about trade journals that may be read by the different groups involved in making the buying decision and try linking out to informative articles on those sites. This bolsters the link juice that your blog post has, and it may even get someone attention at those publications who may want to feature your thoughts in an upcoming issue, which can be a great way to increase your authority. Secondly, linking out to these publications allows Google and other search engines to view you with more respect. You will also want to add some internal links to case studies, white papers, and other scholarly articles that your company has produced to support your arguments.
Influencer Marketing
Stop and think about someone in each of the different groups who must buy into your blog’s idea for your company’s sales to increase. Send them a personal message asking them to read your blog. This is especially important if your blog addresses something that you know they have already been thinking about. Hopefully, they will see your blog as thoughtful and want to share it with their friends through their social media accounts. If you cannot think of any of these people, then do a quick search for LinkedIn groups and see if you can find some discussions about topics that your blog addresses and share the blog’s link there when allowed. Before sharing, make sure to use a program to minimize your blog’s address so that you do not eat up a lot of space.
Comment on the Work of Others
You may already be following some other blogs with topics like yours, so if they accept comments, post a link to your blog in their comment section. The key to making this work for you is to read the blog and tie your comments directly to the blog you are reading and your blog. If you need to develop some new sources, then use sites like StumbleUpon, BuzzFeed and Digg to find them. You will not have much luck there, however, unless you regularly participate, so clear out some time in your schedule to keep abreast of what’s happening on these sites.
Send a Teaser to Your Email List
You can use all those email addresses that you have carefully harvested to promote your blog. Do not, however, simply cut and paste your blog into your email as that will not generate traffic to your site. Instead, create a teaser email that intrigues viewers to go read what you have to say. If you have not already done so, then create a subscription box on your website so that some audience members will automatically get notified each time you post. You can also create a customized signature for each email you send that includes a link to your post.
Repurpose Your Blog Post
While blogs are an extremely popular way to promote your website, remember that they are not right for every audience member. Therefore, it is important that you repurpose your website into several different formats. For example, you might use the content to create a podcast, create a slide share presentation of its most important parts or expand on your ideas to create a whitepaper or an e-book.
Congratulations on writing an excellent blog post! Now, finish your task by promoting it by adding some links, sharing it with others including your email list and repurposing it into other content. You will see your return-on-investment grow substantially because it is difficult for a blog post to be discovered without blog marketing.
