Your clients have a blog and something to say. How do you get the word out about their great solution for customer service down times or post advocating using sustainable cotton for clothing?
You have the same content marketing channels open to you for your client's blog as you do for white papers, e-books, webinars, and other content you want to promote.
Promoting a blog is not the same as promoting a product or service. You are offering valuable content that solves people’s problems. You are not selling anything, you are offering information.
Here are 3 ways to promote your client's blog to increase your readership:
If you already send a newsletter to your customers and other subscribers, you have a perfect place to offer a sample of your blog. By putting a sentence or two of a post in a regular part of the newsletter with a link to the post itself you can drive visitors to your website and blog if their interest is piqued by your tease.
If you can make it a regular part of your newsletter you can also allow people to subscribe to your blog via email. By sending the entire entry to be opened within the email application you get the word out to people who might be too busy to visit your site or who may not be able to click through.
Social Networking Sites
Facebook is a good, general use networking site where you can post a portion of your blog entry and a link back to your site. If you have both a company and a personal page, consider posting on both.
Twitter is an excellent place for announcing new blog posts. With the help of an application like Hootsuite you can schedule tweets about your new content at times when your targeted audience is likely to see them. If you schedule multiple tweets change the titles. And don’t tweet about it 100 times…a couple of times on a couple of days should be sufficient.
Linked In
Linked in is more business focused. If you are blogging about customer service or marketing your blog should fit right in. If your post receives enough shares it may be featured on Linked In Today, a targeted news blog customized by topic.
Pinterest and Instagram
Both of these sites are very visual. Including interesting images or video with your blog post will make it more likely to be shared.
Other Blogs and Articles
In the comments section of a blog post that is relevant to a post you just wrote you can add your commentary about the article or blog you just read and leave a link to your related blog post. Don’t go around doing this on every blog you read. If you leave a multitude of unrelated links, you will be labeled a spammer.
There is also the road not often taken. There are sites that are worth looking into for promotional potential. One is Quora.com, a Q&A type site that is business and academically oriented. Slideshare is a good place for an overview of your blog and posts.
Get Your Content Out There
There is no rule of social media etiquette that says you shouldn’t share your content. If you are thoughtful about where and how you share, your clients can gain new readers without causing a backlash.