Yesterday I talked about using both your social media spokes and those of your readers to promote your blog, and today I’m going to talk about other marketing tools you should be using to let people know about your blog. Let’s step back and talk about how this really is not a new problem. When I started VillageWorks in 1999 (wow, am I old) the problem used to be how to let people know you had a website. What worked then, still works now.
I suggest to clients to add your blog address to anything that currently has your website address. This includes, business cards, email signatures, marketing collateral, and your email newsletter. If you are adding it to printed materials, you may want to wait until you do run out of the item and do your next print job so you don’t incur a lot of extra expense. Of course don’t forget to promote your blog on the home page of your website and vice versa.
In addition to putting a link to your blog on your email newsletter, you may want to consider integrating the content into your newsletter. You may want to consider adding links to the most popular posts of the month to your newsletter. If people haven’t subscribed to your blog, they are still getting the content and may even consider adding it to their reading list.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about commenting on other people’s blogs as a way to gain traffic. Now it is your turn. Give me some other ideas where you can promote your blog.
Great tips! Another way to promote your blog is to set up a feed directly on your homepage. You can set up a specific area that pulls in your Blog’s RSS and posts snippets from the last few blog posts.
We’ve had some success promoting my boss’ blog at conferences using custom business cards with the blog address and graphics (think mini-advertisement). This is more effective for us than including it on regular business cards (although that’s a good idea too), because our regular business cards aren’t very eye-catching.
This might be a good tactic for companies in industries that aren’t as tech-savvy, and it’s relatively inexpensive to print business cards. The do-it-yourself options have significantly improved in quality in the last few years (i.e., you can’t see the perforations any more!).
Great ideas guys. Thanks for sharing them with us.
I would also recommend that if any of your company’s staff or employees are on Twitter, they include the blog url in their bio. Even if they might not be blatantly Tweeting on behalf of the company, they are always in some fashion representing the person/establishment they’re working for.
Don’t you think?
Ashley, great idea especially if they use Twitter for work. Thanks.