Blog Marketing

1.  Write to and for a defined target audience

Just like giving a speech, you will be most successful if you understand who the audience is, what their needs, problems and "hot buttons" are.  This is called targeting in marketing.  The more "niche" (specific and narrow) your target audience is, the fewer people your blog will appeal to BUT they will be very, very "qualified" leads and perhaps also reporters and analysts looking for an expert to quote in their article.

• Targeting
  

2.  Develop a blog plan and strategy

Determine what "success" means.  Maybe your blog is intended to influence a small group of potential customers or industry thought leaders in the press.  Or, maybe your blog is intended to create a two-way dialog with your customers.  Or, perhaps you want to enhance your personal brand reputation or generate leads.  Whatever the purpose(s) of your blog, just like with any marketing program you want to develop a plan, strategy and success measures.

Help people. If you are writing to business readers, help them perform their jobs better by providing insightful analysis and commentary on industry issues, technical challenges, and other work-related matters. Offer links to white papers, instructional videos, product applications and important articles. Highlight relevant webinars.

• Planning Your Business Blog
  

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3.  Mention as many people as possible in your blog

While big city newspaper circulations have decreased significantly, most small town local newspapers are thriving.  Why?  They focus on local news and use this strategy:  to include stories, quotes and photos of as many people as possible in the local community in each issue of the paper.  You can use this approach with your blog. 

Remember Dale Carnegie's famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People?  That is all about recognizing others and taking the spotlight off yourself. 

Start the conversation.  Ask questions.  Be humble.  Help others. 

4.  Invite guests to write - give them the spotlight

This will make your blog more interesting to your readers.  And relieve you of the pressure of knowing it all.

Recruit employees to contribute to the blog as well as industry leaders, engineers and others with expertise that may interest your audience. Be sure to let them know they don't have to be expert writers or compose long articles. For example, a blog entry could be a paragraph with a comment and link to an interesting article.

5.  Post to your blog as frequently as possible

If you post less than once a week, your blog readers may lose interest. 

Search engines gravitate toward fresh content.

Hire an expert to promote your blog

 

It's a lot of work to write a blog and a lot of work to market a blog.  Perhaps you want to focus on writing the blog and hire a freelancer to take on the responsibilities to market and promote your blog?  Authors of books often hire publicists to do the promotion job for them.  If you want to create a very successful blogging reputation, you may want to hire someone with expertise in promoting blogs. 

• Find Marketing Experts to Hire
  

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