There are so many reasons why every company should run a blog that it doesnt make much sense to not have one. A company blog is a great way to build up your reputation as an industry leader and expert. Its also a good place to add a little personality to stiff and flat company websites. Blogs let you connect with other industry professionals and companies, as well as your consumers. Well-optimized blog posts can rank well in the search engines, increasing your online presence. A well-written and popular blog post can get referenced on other sites, increasing the number of inbound links to your site. The benefits are well worth the effort of writing two or three blog posts a week.
Leveraging a blog post to provide added value for your company takes only a bit more effort.
Popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon (among others) are a great place to submit your blog posts to every time one goes live. These sites are visited by thousands of people every day, so they can be a valuable source of traffic. Chances are there are smaller social bookmarking sites for your industry niche (like SERPD for SEO) where you should also be submitting posts.
Your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn audiences and your blog readers probably dont line up 100%. Every time a post goes live, you should Tweet it, post a snippet of the post to your Facebook Page and submit the story to your LinkedIn groups. You can also promote it on any other social networks you are a part of. The point of social media is to connect and engage your audience. By promoting your blog posts, you are giving your social network a reason to reconnect with you. One tip: dont post the whole blog post to your social networking profiles. You can leave a snippet, but link over to the actual blog post itself. This will help drive traffic.
Once youve built up a decent archive of blog posts (three months worth or so) you can start to recycle the old blog posts into your company newsletters. Even the most loyal readers arent going to read and remember every post youve ever published. As long as the information in that post is still relevant, why not reuse it and bring the post back to life. Youd be amazed at what kind of traffic those old blog posts can get when you incorporate them into your newsletter.
At the end of your blog post, ask a question to your readers and invite them to answer in the comments section. Blogs are inherently social by nature; you should encourage your readers to join in on the conversation. It is easier to keep readers engaged if you let them voice their opinions. You might even get some great post topics out of their comments. Letting readers comment is also a good way to build relationships with your readers and other industry professionals.
Social sharing buttons are a great way to let your readers do the promoting for you. The Google +1 button recently went live, have you added it to your cache of social buttons? You can also include share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, StumbleUpon, Delicious and more. The easier it is for a reader to share, the better chance you have of getting your blog post in front of a new audience.
These are just five tactics that you can implement to better market your own company blog. If you have found other useful ways to promote your blog, please let me know!