A successful blogging campaign can put a business on the map with better search engine rankings and a sympathetic customer base. Most advice on the best principles of successful corporate blogging tends to focus on the ways in which a blogger might write the most interesting material to publish for his audience. For some reason though, they forget how blogging is supposed to be about content marketing and not just the content.
What that means is that no matter how engaging the content on a corporate blog might be, it won't make any difference if it isn't found by a base of interested readers. A corporate blogger, as he makes his latest observation on the state of the industry in a post, imagines that readers, impressed with the astuteness evident in the writing, will fall over themselves to show their appreciation by becoming loyal business customers.
In reality though, once the search engines index a blog update at some point, the only thing that happens is that the masterpiece disappears in a sea of blog posts by millions of other bloggers. Results, if they come at all, don’t show up for months. The trick to success in corporate blogging therefore rests in one's ability to get the word about one's updates out as forcefully as possible. This is what you can do to make that happen.
Massaging your content with the right keywords - Even a little keyword integration can make a big difference to how wide an audience a post reaches. To do this can be pretty simple. All you need to do is to look through your blog post to identify a few words that reflect what the post is all about. Now with those words in hand, you need to find out what, according to Google, are the most relevant and popular ways in which to refer to those ideas. This is where the free keyword suggestion tool from Google AdWords comes in. The tool supplies you with synonyms and alternative phrasings for the ideas you have in mind. When you make changes to the post you've written (the title, the post itself and the meta-tag description, should all reflect Google’s suggestions), making use of Google’s suggestions, you will find that your optimized piece hits the mark a lot more often than it otherwise could.
Understanding syndication - If your company’s blog has a fan, the easiest way to lose that fan would be to leave it to him to remember to come back each time there is an update. Every time you have an approving reader coming in to your blog, you need to make use of that goodwill as early in the process as possible by signing him up to your blog’s RSS feed. Blogs often lose their audience by not offering their readers a chance to subscribe. It doesn't take much to set it up. To publish your updates on your company's Facebook Business Page, you just need to set it up in the Social RSS application on Facebook. LinkedIn works similarly if you wish to automatically post all your content to your LinkedIn Personal Profile.
Facebook status updates -If you could shorten the URL of each new blog update and post that as a status update on your business’ Facebook page, all of the Facebook friends your business has should get a heads-up in near real-time. However, only a few Facebook followers of any business can be expected to be online at any given time. For this reason, you need to post those status updates several times - at different times of the day and week. That would be the only way you could reach all of those Facebook friends. Tools like HootSuite help automate this.
Social bookmarking - While bookmarking may not be as popular today as it was a year ago, it still does enjoy quite a following. Post your content on every social bookmarking site, Deli.cio.us, and Digg among others, and you can profit by receiving tons of back links and traffic.
Recognize other blogs – There are probably plenty of blogs out there that deal in the kind of news or opinion that your blog deals in. If you make useful and relevant comments on those blogs on a regular basis, you'll soon catch the eye of the bloggers over there. When you establish relationships with other bloggers, you can be sure that they will mention you in their blog from time to time. Not to mention, every time you make a quick (but relevant) comment on another blog, you get a chance to include the name of your blog in your username.
Your e-mail signature - Adding your blog post’s URL to your e-mail signature for every company e-mail that goes out, can be a great way of spreading the word.
Personal attention to your customers - If you feel that a post of yours could be of use to a specific customer, sending the blog post through e-mail to that customer could make him feel especially cared for; and you could win one more reader for your blog.
Content promotion on the social networking sites - Most social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn will allow you to promote your blog on their websites in any way that is appropriate. Whether it's LinkedIn Answers or Group Forums, Facebook groups or even industry forums, bringing your post up is usually considered relevant self-promotion.
Reciprocal arrangements - Often, you can just go out and speak to other bloggers who deal in the kind of ideas your blog deals in; and you could offer reciprocal arrangements with an offer to mention their blog in return for their mentioning yours. Doing this can give you great back links from quality websites.
Track your results - Whatever you do to promote your blog, you need to make sure that your methods actually work. If you have analytics installed on your blog, you should be able to see the results of your efforts.
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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in July, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.
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