Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule when it comes to blogging? Business owners should spend 20 percent of their time writing and planning blog posts (or other forms of content), and another 80 percent of their time promoting a particular piece.
That’s a lot of time to devote to promoting a published blog post. There are only so many hours in a day to spend to promote a blog, and as a business owner, there simply isn’t a way to spend that much time on blog promotion.
Or is there?
If you’re a business owner who’s short on time but needs to expand your audience reach, you’re in luck. You can easily take on multiple avenues of promoting your business blog on a daily basis. Some ideas are automated and others require a bit of strategy, but they all will help you increase your blog’s overall exposure.
And best of all, it’ll take you less than an hour a day, depending on how in-depth you decide to go with your promotion.
Here are 7 ways that you can promote your company blog on a daily basis.
1. Turn to Your Social Accounts (And Post More Than Once Per Day)
When you’re looking to promote your blog on a daily basis, you’ll want to be as efficient as possible. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have tested the waters with social media, you might already have an idea as to what social accounts bring in the most traffic. For example, LinkedIn can work wonders for blogging promotion with some companies. With others, LinkedIn might be a bust, while Twitter sends a fair amount of traffic to your website.
When you’re looking to maximize your blog promotion efforts in a short time period, stick to what works for you. Take advantage of your top-performing social accounts and leverage them to promote your blog.
Don’t forget, you can post links to your blog more than once a day, especially if you’re using Twitter—just be careful not to overflow the feed. You can also publish old blog posts on your social accounts to get more mileage and exposure from your content. As long as the blog content is relevant, feel free to share it over time.
2. Tap Into Social Groups And Communities
There’s more to social media than just a simple profile and newsfeed. Social platforms such as LinkedIn and Google+ have dozens of communities where you can share your company blog. These groups can help you tap into a new customer base and send traffic straight to your company blog.
Keep in mind that there is etiquette when it comes to promoting your blog in online communities. If you simply join a community with the sole purpose of promoting your blog and nothing else, there’s a chance that your posts will be ignored—or you could potentially be banned.
The idea behind joining online communities is to give and take. Give thoughtful, useful feedback to other people who are promoting blog posts. This will help you establish credibility in the group without coming across as a spammer.
Not to mention, it can help you build relationships with potential customers, or network with others in your own field.
It really only takes a couple minutes to leave a thoughtful post within your social group, and your comments can pay off in the long run.
3. Keep Quora in Mind
Quora is another social community, although it isn’t tied to a social media platform like Google+ or LinkedIn communities. The other aspect that makes Quora unique is that the community is kept running by people who are asking and answering questions. There are questions on the platform that are relevant to your industry, and people who are asking these questions could turn into customers.
Even if you’re a brick and motor business, there still is opportunity for you on Quora. For example, someone might ask the community what it is like to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you are a real estate agent, this is the perfect time to jump in and give a lot of good retails about the city of Pittsburgh, and subtly mention your real estate services.
The key to Quora is that you need to provide answers that are helpful and in-depth. Providing an answer in the form of a sentence or two won’t help you much in terms of establishing credibility or reaching a new customer base.
You can easily add Quora to your daily blog promotion to-do list. In about 10 minutes a day, you can search for relevant questions and add your expert insight—and in turn, you’ll help position yourself as an industry leader in your field while potentially gaining new customers along the way.
4. Focus on Keywords For Automated Search Engine Promotion
While this type of promotion is a bit more indirect than posting on Quora or social communities, it still helps to gain traction and awareness with your company blog. When you write blog posts, try to focus on a few keywords that your customers might type into the search engines to find your business.
The beauty of this style of promotion is that it’s automated. Over time, your chosen keywords will continue to work around the clock and help the search engine rank your website accordingly. Once your website reaches the first page of the search engine under your best keywords, you can continue to build with more blog content, or target more keywords of your choosing.
It’s important to remember that while keywords are important, the quality of your content matters just as much to Google (if not more). Today, it’s not enough to stuff a blog post with keywords and call it a day. Keywords help build the foundation of your business blog strategy, but quality keeps the engine running.
5. Repurpose Old Blog Content (Project Based)
If you have some creative flair and you want to get more mileage out of your business blog’s promotion, consider repurposing your old blog content. If you have a blog post that performed particularly well, repurpose it into a snack-size slideshow, or even incorporate some video.
While you probably don’t have the time to repurpose your blog content every single day, you can break tasks up into manageable chunks over the week, or whatever else suits your schedule.
So, if you dedicate 15 minutes per day into repurposing your blog content, you could have a new slideshow by the end of the week. And if you host the slideshow on a site like Slideshare, it will help promote your blog on a new platform.
6. Add a Link to Your Blog on Your E-Mail Signature
As a business owner, you likely send out e-mails on a daily basis. One super easy way to promote your blog is to include its link in your e-mail signature. That way, e-mails that you send out will include a quick promo—and you don’t have to even think twice about including it.
7. Leverage The Power of Business Cards
In addition to your e-mail signature, build buzz around your blog by using your business card. Nearly every business card includes a website and e-mail address—all you have to do is include a direct address to your blog, and you can send potential clients straight to informative and engaging content.
Not to mention, this can give you extra motivation to hand out a few more business cards on a daily basis.
Do You Promote Your Blog Every Day?
We’re all strapped for time these days, and blog promotion might have found its way to the bottom of your priority list. However, it’s important to remember that blog promotion is mandatory if you’re expecting to see a positive ROI.
By combining a few of these action items with automated blog promotion techniques, you can develop a powerful blog promotion strategy that can increase your overall traffic and ultimately boost business.
No spam. Ever.
Nice tips here Amanda. I use many of these but have not been really that big on Quora. I will need to devote some time to that one too. All the best to you and thanks for the reminders and checklist.
Thank you, Steven! Yes, Quora still remains as a somewhat hidden secret for blog marketing, but it can certainly help promote your blog in a big way. Thank you for reading!