9 Tips For Launching a New Small Business Blog
New small business blogs are launched every day and the sheer volume of that content makes standing out to potential subscribers and customers a real challenge. I've found as a long time small business blogger for my SEO agency with over 30,000 subscribers and 100k visitors per month, blogs can be one of the most effective ways to create connections with prospects and customers. However, unless you promote that content and the blog, it may go unnoticed.
Based on my experience as a B2B marketing blogger for more than 6 1/2 years, here are 9 tips for marketing and promoting a new small business blog:
Add A Link – If it’s a company blog, or if it’s attached to another site, add a link to the blog from the main navigation on the parent website. This type of link is good for SEO and website visitors are increasingly expecting the company websites they visit to also include a blog.
Email – Add a link to the blog in your email signature. Wherever you publish your web site address, you should publish your blog URL.
Newsletter – If you have a newsletter, announce the blog and introduce contributors. Ask your newsletter subscribers what they're interested in and you might even be able to attract contributors.
Network – Announce the blog to your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections and any other social networks that you are apart of. Make relevant comments on other small business or topically specific blogs using a link to your blog in the comment form vs. a link to your company web site.
Press Release – If you feel that the blog is important enough to support a press release, put one out.
Submit – Submit the blog to blog & feed directories. These types of sites do not send much traffic individually, but many of the syndicate content and can provide links for SEO and expose your content to new audiences.
Link – One way to get other bloggers to notice you is to link to them. Summarize someone else’s long blog post, expand upon someones shorter post, or just write your thoughts on a topic that someone else wrote about and link back to the original post.
Give Away – If it’s a product blog, run a promotion on the blog giving away one of your products. Sometimes the value that can come out of giving something away can be more beneficial than all the items above. Be sure you are up to date on FTC disclosure guidelines about gifts and bloggers.
Guest Post – If there are other blogs in your industry, ask around and see if they’d allow you to guest post for them. In return, you’d get a link back to your blog in your profile, or post, on their site. Many bloggers experience burnout, so a guest post can be a welcome relief.
No matter how effective your blog promotions are, there's no substitute for good content. Even the best blog marketing tactics will be fruitless unless those visitors find something useful AND the blog publisher has made it easy to share that content. Be persistent with publishing blog posts whether people comment or not. Ask questions at the end of your posts to solicit interaction and make sure you reply to comments quickly. Show expertise and format posts to be very readable and linkable. Interact with your community on and off the blog, and of course, make sure you are using relevant and popular keywords for topics, titles and the text links between posts.
