I’ve got a business blog – now what?!

Posted on by Kylie Fennell
Businesses are pretty well versed these days in digital marketing and social media. Many of them have branched out and created a blog.Painstaking hours are spent trying to come up with engaging content that is highly relevant to target markets.

It features great useful content and looks fantastic, and you’re confident of getting hundreds of subscribers, thousands of hits and hopefully lots of promising leads.
You built it, so by all rights, they should come…right?…but they don’t.
The first thing you need to do is congratulate yourself. 
The next thing is to figure out how to best leverage your blog to help achieve your marketing and business objectives.
It’s important first to have realistic objectives for your blog.
If you expect a hundred new leads to come from your blog each month, it may not be achievable (this of course depends on your industry and the content itself).
Sometimes having a blog isn’t just about leads, but about search engine optimisation and building credibility for yourself and your brand.
That being said, you shouldn’t despair. Here are my six top tips on how to leverage your blog.
  1. Use your content in multiple ways – if you are going to the trouble of creating great content, make the most out of it. Post excerpts on social media, create mini ebooks, create a video and post to YouTube, write a White Paper, paid search, website links, banner ads, create a media release or compile content into an e-newsletter. Also don’t forget to leverage your other marketing activities on your blog. For example, if you have a great media story appear in the local paper, promote it across on your blog.
  2. Make it easy to subscribe – a subscription list is a valuable database of potential leads (as long as you adhere to relevant privacy and anti-spam laws). The key is having a call to action message such as: “Subscribe here and never miss our updates”. The sidebar is a great place for a sign-up form, but don’t ask for more than three fields. Research has shown that any more than three fields discourages readers from signing up. A pop-up subscription form is an option but can annoy people. Use these only for important messages or exclusive offers such as, “today only, sign-up and receive a free copy of our e-book on…”
  3. Promote yourself (within reason) – link back to other relevant blog posts (your’s and others) and your website page. You can also include an advertisement for yourself in the sidebar. Test it though. If you don’t experience significant click throughs via your ad, you may need to reassess. Make sure you include a great About Me page if your blog is hosted on a separate site to your business website. If not, include a great profile and image with your blog post.
  4. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect – sometimes you may be working on a tool or resource that would be greatly useful and interesting to your target audience. It’s a great idea to share it as a work-in-progress or Version One. Then ask your readers for feedback and ideas, which encourages engagement but also gives you an opportunity to improve your product or service, as well as a chance to publish another blog post with Version 2. There’s a great blog post here on how deliberately making content that becomes obsolete, is a great idea. 
  5. Offer variety.Provide lots of different types of posts. Mix it up with guest bloggers, Q and As, infographics, podcasts.
  6. Promote your clients – use your blog to create stories about your customers. These serve the purpose of a testimonial, without necessarily reading like a case study.

So yes you built it, you just need to nurture it now. 
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Kylie Fennell
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