Business Blog Boost: Don’t Overlook Your Greatest Fans

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Successfully using a business blog to drive online lead generation requires a few key elements:

Quality blog content.
Engaging calls-to-action that link to effective landing pages for offers readers want.
Readers.
Engagement.
Shares.

Even the best blogs need the help of evangelists—those readers and fans who help spread the word to their contacts, increasing the blog’s reach exponentially.

When you first think of evangelists, you probably think of satisfied customers, regular readers, or like-minded colleagues in related businesses and industries. (Here are a few tips on further engaging your external evangelists: Find Fans Who Will Praise Your Business Blog.)

But don’t stop there.

Even the best blogs need the help of evangelists.

Remember that some of your biggest fans are just down the hall.

Just as everyone one of the customers and influencers in your marketing database has his or her own reach, so do your colleagues. Use them to your advantage.

Here are few dos and don’ts to leveraging internal evangelists to continue to boost your business blog’s reach.

DO: Directly email fellow employees links to blog posts that relate to their specialties.

As much as we’d like to think everyone in our company is reading every post we publish, the reality is that they aren’t. So you may need to clue them in.

If you’ve just published a post about an award your customer service department received, make sure you send a congratulation (and link to the post) to that manager and others in the department. Or if you’ve completed a Q&A with a satisfied customer about a specific product, make sure that the sales rep who works with that customer knows about it, along with the product development team or others responsible for the product featured.

People like to share about their own success or those of their team, so make sure they have the opportunity to do so.

Make it easy for blog readers to click a “share” button.

DO: Make sharing easy and ask them to do it.

You make it easy for blog readers to click a “share” button and access pre-written status updates. Do the same for your colleagues. If you give them a sample tweet with a shortened URL already included, it’s an easy copy/paste for them—and you’ve controlled the message, as well.

DON’T: Send every post to everyone.

We all get too many emails as it is. If your colleagues want to see every post, chances are they have already subscribed for your blog updates. If they haven’t, emailing them daily will likely mean all of your emails end up being ignored. Only send relevant posts, so you don’t overwhelm and annoy your potential evangelists.

DON’T: Forget to ask for feedback.

Make communication about your business blog a two-way relationship with others in your company. Invite your colleagues to offer suggestions for topics or even to write guest posts. They’ll be even more likely to share content they had a direct role in creating.

A few thoughts on tapping into internal sources for ideas:

To truly get the most from your business blog in terms of online lead generation, you need to make it the center of your inbound marketing universe, aim to create big hit content and leverage evangelists, internal and external. You’ll find more details on all of these strategies in our free ebook: How to Grow & Scale Your Business Blog. Download it today, and get growing.