What does it take to get people reading your blog?
In this article, you’ll discover 7 powerful ways to start generating traffic (customers) to your company’s blog.
As a business, launching a blog and creating the first few posts are often the easy part. You need to promote it to increase its effectiveness online, reach your target audience, and grow your business.
Your company’s blog can be a great marketing tool for providing useful and actionable information to your prospects and existing customers. It’s an effective way of acquiring leads.
Research shows that companies that blog consistently generate 64% more qualified leads than companies that do not.
The content that you publish on your blog will represent the core principles of your company’s culture, and how much impact you’re going to make in your industry.
Most companies struggle to build successful blogs that, in turn, drives their growth. The major challenge faced by 63% of companies is driving traffic and leads to their blog, according to the HubSpot’s State of Inbound.
Blogging will establish you as a thought leader in your industry. It’ll drive awareness for your brand, and help you to rank better in the organic search engines.
But how do you grow your blog’s traffic and leads, seeing they’re the most important goals to pursue?
It all boils down to promoting your company’s blog. And here are 7 ways to do it:
1. Turn Your Blog Posts into Podcast
There are currently over 750,000 Podcast shows with 30 million episodes as of June 2019, according to data by Podcast Insight.
The rising popularity of podcast has also been highlighted by Apple confirming that there were over 550,000 podcasts at WWDC 2018 in early June. It’s the golden age of Podcasts.
Considering the reach of Podcasts, you can turn your blog posts into podcast episodes that your audience can listen to while they drive to work, at their workplace, or in their leisure time, pretty much any time.
You don’t have to use any fancy software to do it. Just take the ideas in your blog posts, then record a podcast with the key point.
Or be a guest in someone else’s podcast channel — then share the ideas from your blog. In your podcast session, you can reference your posts or link to any specific page of your choice. This will drive additional traffic to your blog.
Blog posts in audio podcasts have several benefits for your marketing campaigns as it can drive huge traffic to your business.
As you know, not everyone likes to read long blog posts, some prefer to watch videos or listen to podcasts.
So, by simply repurposing your best content into audio content, you can increase the reach, target the right audience, drive traffic to your blog, and do it all over again.
2. Promote Your Blog Internally
Internal links are an On-Page ranking factor. Interlinking is one of the great ways to promote your content to your already established audience. It creates a simple site architecture for search crawlers.
Interlinking or linking internally is a marketing strategy where you link to one of your existing pages within your domain.
“It can help you rank higher for more keywords on Google,” says Blake Smart from SEMrush.span style
If you’re targeting a long-tail keyword with less competition and low-quality search results, you can outrank these results with good internal linking.
It also works great on an established blog. For example, when Ninja Outreach started interlinking their pages, the site’s organic traffic grew by 40%.
Google, in particular, will rank your blog pages higher in its organic results if your internal pages are easily accessible.
And that’s what you create with internal linking.
On the other hand, interlinks help your readers to navigate your blog better and read important blog posts that were hitherto hidden from the navigation menu.
This way, not only will the search engines index every page of your website but you also increase your blog’s visibility in the search results.
3. Leverage Social Media Advertising to Promote Your Blog
Sometimes, you need to step out and spend a few hundred dollars to get traction online, especially for a new blog.
If you’re not investing money for marketing purposes, how far can you go? Savvy businesses are investing a lot more on digital advertising than traditional advertising.
You need to allocate a portion of your marketing budget to blog promotion. Growing a company’s blog or any blog for that matter requires planning. And you need to add a budget to your plan.
You need to make it even more audience-oriented by marketing through Facebook, Instagram, or even Quora Ad platforms.
Once you publish a new blog post, you should share it across every social network your business has made an appearance on.
This will typically include Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin for most B2B companies, while some will also be active on social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram if you want to appeal to an audience that prefers ‘visual content.’
There isn’t even a single reason why your content shouldn’t be available on social media immediately after it goes live.
Social media has the right audience for your blog. Imagine how much traffic and leads you’ll drive to your blog if you spend a few hundred dollars on advertising.
There are more than 3.1 billion active social media users as of 2018.
For Quora, though, it’s always good to test the waters first. Here’s a summary of how you can promote your posts on Quora:
- Find relevant Quora threads to your business where you can get into the conversation with other people.
- Write some useful answers and don’t go spamming the platform. Be helpful.
- Where necessary, reference and link to your blog post to provide additional information to your answer. That’s all!
If you decide to use Facebook, though, bear in mind that organic reach on Facebook is nothing to write home about. So it’s always better to use paid ads instead.
For Facebook ads, you can get clicks for under $0.30. So if your budget is $30 per month, you’ll be getting 100 clicks to your company’s blog and posts.
4. Using Social Media Tools
To get the most results out of social media, you need some form of automation.
You have to schedule your posts so that it goes out to your fans on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms even while you’re sleeping.
Your social media marketing manager needs to be aware of the market trends and reshare that particular post, keeping in view the current existing trend.
It can be hectic for your employees to do this manually. To speed things up a bit, using social media scheduling tools is the best way to go.
Sprout Social, for example, is a social scheduling tool that allows you to catalog and schedule posts for social sharing.
You can tweet instantly or schedule your blog posts to automatically appear on your feed. Some other popular tools are HootSuite, Buffer, Later (for Instagram), etc.
There are tasks that your social media marketing manager needs to perform whenever your blog post is published.
He or she can quickly log in to your social media tool of choice and re-share the post on social media, or schedule it for a later time.
You probably will want to share it multiple times the first day it’s posted.
You can switch to a bi-monthly re-sharing schedule and then eventually a monthly plan. You can decide to re-share your posts for the entire year with this platform.
Scheduling your posts instead of posting manually on social media is a smart way to speed up your posting workflow.
With a handy social media posting tool, you’re making a piece of content as much productive for your company as it will be used to market to your target audience multiple times.
If you don’t schedule your content promotion on social media networks like this, you will lose track of your available posts, and laziness will often slow the momentum down.
Since it’ll take 10 minutes after you publish a post to add it to your social media tool and automate its promotion, you should be excited to do it.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the use of email to promote your products or services. But you can also use it to promote your blog posts, or any message you want to get across to your customers.
The use of email marketing for brand promotion is more popular than ever — as it helps businesses to achieve a myriad of goals, based on a survey report from Marketing Charts.
Research shows that 85% of US retailers consider email marketing a useful tool for bringing new customers.
And businesses are excited about email marketing because it’s a proven way to increase ROI, according to V12Data.
In today’s digital world where 94% of internet users use email, email marketing is a direct, efficient, and cheap form of marketing for your company’s blog.
It’s used to develop relationships with potential customers, retain old customers, and keep them updated on your products’ discounts, offers, or any other promotional deals.
If someone has recently subscribed to your company’s email list, make sure you send them a quick and interesting email to notify them about your new post. Here’s a good example:
Of course, you don’t have to do this all the time — only share your best posts with email subscribers.
Highlighting two or three sentences about the important points of your post would be enough. Don’t give too much information as you want users to click through and read the complete blog post.
There are a lot of free and paid software and automation tools out there that make email marketing quite easy.
For example, MailChimp, Constant Contact, MyEmma, GetResponse, and many other email service providers can be used to schedule and send out emails.
These tools also allow you to monitor how your subscribers interact (open or not) with your emails.
Additionally, these email marketing platforms are packed with other advanced features for building visual automation, creating email sequences, personalization, list segmentation, and A/B testing.
6. Promote Your Blog Posts on Reddit
Reddit is a great resource that can bring a large amount of traffic to your blog.
According to Alexa.com, Reddit is ranked the #6 most visited websites in the United States (#17 globally).
An average user spends 11:29 minutes per day on Reddit compared to Facebook’s 9:34 minutes.
The latest data from Reddit shows that the platform now has 330 million monthly
active users.
However, you must become a regular member of the Reddit community before promoting your blog posts on the platform.
First, find out some subreddits that are related to your brand and see what kind of posts gets traction. Get involved in the conversation as a member of that subreddit and start to comment and upvote threads.
For example, if you’re in the personal finance industry, then here are some of the subreddits:
Post only relevant and high-quality content on Reddit! Whenever you post a blog post, Reddit users will click to check it out.
If the post is interesting and informative, people would love to check your website again and again.
However, if you post generic, low quality, and off-topic content, it’ll get downvoted and you would lose your reputation (Karma).
You also want to become familiar with the community rules, so your posts don’t violate them in any way.
7. Be Responsive
You need to reply to the comments of your readers be it on Facebook, Twitter, forums, Quora, or Reddit. Remember, blogs are social, so people will ask questions, share thoughts, provide feedback, or criticize your post.
You need to be responsive there 24 hours and you must delete the spam posts. This will ensure you don’t lose credibility on the platform.
Readers and search engines appreciate Consistency.
Regularly engaging the readers by comments or posts will encourage readers to return to your blog which will keep your company’s blog active and useful in the search engine.
Keep in mind that your traffic may not grow until you start engaging with people on social media, and your blog.
For your newly-published post, your traffic will likely look disappointing.
But as you start promoting the new post using different strategies and platforms, your traffic begins to grow:
Then eventually, search, social, and direct traffic sources will outperform other sources.
You might get an initial traffic spike but eventually, your post will fade away. But when you start answering questions, engaging with people in the comment, and being helpful, your traffic will either remain steady or increase.
Regardless of your technique for promoting your company’s blog, being consistent and responsive are key. You’ve got to make up your mind to do this or get help from a virtual assistant (VA).
Conclusion
Effective blog marketing strategies and tactics will drive traffic, leads, and sales to your business.
At the end of the day, creating high-quality posts is the best way successful companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Starbucks, and others excelled and trounced the competition in their industries.
Your blog is your billboard to the world. If your artwork isn’t colorful and helpful, it may not attract eyeballs. In the same vein, if your blog posts aren’t useful and interesting, people will not read it. Period!
If you’re just getting started in blog marketing, you can learn all of the required skills that will help you build relationships with customers, come up with good ideas for blog posts, research credible data points for your post, and create compelling post that will grow your business.
If you’re stuck with coming up with new ideas for promoting your company’s blog, you can implement one of the strategies above. You’ll see an upward growth curve in your analytics dashboard.
As usual, share your thoughts and questions below.