How To Achieve Blog Visibility In Four Simple Steps
Blogs are a great way to create some buzz around your products and services, to attract traffic to your website and to give your online presence a bit of personality. However, the issue with a blog is that it’s really only effective if someone can see it. It’s widely acknowledged that a large proportion of blogs tend to go relatively unnoticed by the vast majority of the British online public, which if you’re blogging about your favourite recipes or your new pet isn’t really such a big deal. However, when you’re investing the time and effort into setting up a blog for your business then you need to start seeing something in the way of returns. Those returns are only likely to come if your blog is seen, so here are a few tips on how to achieve blog visibility.
Make your blog obvious on your website
Many businesses pour resources into designing and structuring a website but then leave the blog as something of an afterthought. This is a mistake as it makes the blog seem less credible and means that it’s unlikely to be seen by website visitors. Given that those visiting your website are much more likely to pick up and run with topics from your blog than pages from your site, you’re genuinely missing an opportunity if you don’t provide an obvious link from the main navigation or the home page to the blog.
You might even want to go so far as to promote the blog – if you’re posting fantastic content that is really effective and is likely to provide a reason for users to want to re-visit your site then the blog is a real asset that you should make obvious to site visitors. Think about including a section on your home page that shows excerpts of the latest blog topics or have the headlines running across the bottom for users to click through.
Link up your posts
You can increase the value you get from past blog posts by including links in newer posts to the older content. Of course, if you’re dealing with content that quickly goes out of date then you might want to avoid this but content that is still relevant and interesting is ideal. This is a great way to draw a visitor into your site and to demonstrate how much depth the blog has – and has had – in terms of providing posts on topics that they might be genuinely interested in. This also works for any other type of content that you’re putting out there, from infographics to e-books – it’s highly likely that the topics that you’re putting together content on will match to some of your previous blog posts so maximise the exposure you can gain and link everything up.
Social media is your launch pad. It’s far easier to build a base of social media followers than it is to accumulate blog followers but you can easily leverage one off the other. Every time you add a new blog to your website post a link to it on every social media channel you’re using and make the covering tweet or post pithy, interesting and easy to repost or retweet. Each time this happens your content is potentially reaching an entirely new set of followers so this is a high return for very little effort. New ideas such as GaggleAMP enable you to create a group of people who are automatically notified when you post social media content, and who can even organise their settings to automatically repost or tweet – these are worth looking into if you want to maximise the reach of the content you have invested in developing.
Offer some guest spots
Guest bloggers are a really easy way to widen the audience for your blog so do some research into those who have a good industry voice, a large social media following, or who currently write in an entertaining way about topics in your sector. Essentially, guest bloggers bring their audience with them so choose someone who has an audience that is apt. That’s not to say you need to opt for a guest blogger with the same audience as you as this won’t increase the reach of your site – the ideal is to choose someone who has a completely different audience, but one that will appreciate the rest of the content on your blog too. Remember to provide the guest blogger with links afterwards and ask them to spread the news of the post via their own social media accounts.
Mention the blog in your email marketing
If you have already put the hard work into building up an email marketing database then that’s a huge resource from which you can start to draw new readers for your blog. It’s highly unlikely that those who receive your email marketing will already be reading your blog if you haven’t yet taken steps to tell them about it so don’t be afraid to mention it as part of the next email marketing sweep.
The chances are that those who read your email marketing will be interested in the content of the blog so this is a really easy way to broaden its scope. If they then start reposting content from it you can reach that new audience in a way that isn’t possible from simple email marketing – people rarely forward marketing emails to others but might do so with a blog link. Whether you just include a link to your blog in the marketing or create an email marketing campaign that is specifically for the purpose of telling people about the blog, this is a highly effective way to gain some great exposure.
If you have put the time and effort into developing great content for your blog then don’t let that go to waste by allowing it to sit there unnoticed. There are so many easy ways to help your blog achieve greater visibility and you might be surprised by just how effective this can be in broadening your online visibility in general.