6 Signs Your Blog Promotion Is Lacking

Successfully using a business blog to drive inbound marketing and lead generation requires a step-by-step approach. What steps are you overlooking?  

Step-By-Step Success

1: Understand your brand identity and buyer personas in order to target your blogging efforts.

2: Plan a blog strategy that meshes with your overall inbound campaigns.

3: Write great posts that readers love.

And, 4: Promote your blog posts to reach as much of your target audience as possible.

Too often, this final step is lost in the shuffle. When that happens, your reach, traffic, leads and sales all fall short of their potential.

How do you know if you aren’t promoting your business blog the way you need to?

Here are 6 signs that you need to step it up.

1. Your business blog is separate from other marketing tools.

Where is your blog hosted: on your primary website or on a separate blog host site? If your business blog isn’t on your business website, you have a disconnect that keeps the blog from feeding directly into your lead capture and or sales.

How are blog post topics planned and scheduled? If blog planning is done in isolation, rather than in cooperation with other departments, you are missing opportunities for your blog and other marketing and public relations tools to build on one another. Even if the blog is considered marekting territory, PR should be involved in planning so the strategies and campaigns planned can support one another (and vice versa).

2. Social media promotion is not planned out.

Does your social media strategy include promoting your blog? If not, you are missing out on free opportunities to get your blog posts and the CTAs within them in front of new eyes. Chances are good the number of followers your social media  accounts boast is larger than your blog subscriber list (unless you’ve built a huge subscriber list while doing very little on social media). Don’t leave those followers out of the loop when it comes to your blog content.

3. Opportunities to promote your blog in other types of communication are missed.

If you strictly think in terms of writing a blog, rather than marketing your blog, you probably aren’t seeing the many different ways, large and small, you can put your blog in front of other readers. Think beyond social media to lead nurturing emails, email signature lines, print materials, press releases, and more. If you can include a link or URL to direct your contacts to more information on your blog, you should do so.

4. Subscriptions aren’t being encouraged.

Organic search traffic to your blog is great, which is why you already focus on the factors that influence SEO (we just covered them here) and here). But if you want a reader to come back frequently enough to develop an understanding of your brand and an appreciation for what you offer, getting them to subscribe to your blog is key. They are much more likely to read more posts, convert on more offers, and potentially become customers if they get that regular reminder each time you publish a new article. (BTW, you can subscribe to the Inbound Accelerator here or in the form at the upper right hand corner of this page.)

5. Your blog is not engaging with others who have potential for influence or shared audiences.

If your blog always offers only a single point of view, with no input from guest bloggers or others with influence in your industry or related industries who have an established following, you miss out on opportunities to introduce your business to new audiences.

6. Your blog is not interactive.

While your blog should be informative and educational, it shouldn’t be static. It should engage readers, encourage them to interact with your website and additional content, inspire them to share what they find with others, and provide opportunities for a conversation, rather than a simple one-sided lecture. Comment sections, links to additional materials, easy buttons for sharing through emails and social media, and solicitation of feedback are all ways to increase engagement.

Does anything sound familiar?

Now that we’ve spelled out why these signs point to weakness in your blog’s needed promotion efforts, find the solutions in our Problem/Solution Sheet: Blog Promotion. By promoting your blog more effectively, you should be able to expand your overall audience and reach more of those key prospects that are ripe for converting into leads and customers.

Tell us what unique tools you have used to promote your blog in the comments!