WordPress for Content Marketing: Promotion, Promotion, Promotion

October 18, 2012 | by | Category:

“How to Launch and Optimize your WordPress Blog for Content Marketing”

Promoting your blog

You can’t put up a blog and expect people to just discover it. While that’s possible, it’s very unlikely. Just like any other business, marketing, or educational program you may run, you need to promote it.

Promote your blog

Promoting Your Business Blog
Always be on the lookout to promote the blog and the content of the blog.

  • Internal – work blog content and links into your on-going communications.
  • Organic – make sure your blog is listed, searched and crawlable.
  • Partners – include customers, clients and partners in the blog program including guest posts and content exchange.

Blog Promotion – Internal
If you want your blog to succeed, you need to promote it. One of the best places to start is with your company’s network.

Consider everyone working within your organization, plus all of their friends and business connections in their own social networks, plus all of their friends and connections… it’s probably bigger than you thought. By tapping into your company’s network you can create greater awareness of your blog and encourage people to read and share its content with their own social networks. This will extend the reach of your content and drive more traffic to your site.

Here are a few tips to promote internally:

  • Put headlines of your blog post on homepage of site so that they automatically update when a new piece is posted.
  • Use blog posts as part of your newsletter with links into the blog post itself or the blog homepage.
  • Ensure RSS feeds are set up on your blog. The RSS feed will alert readers when a new post is on your site to bring them back.
  • Link to the blog from the footer of the website
  • Include the blog in the primary and/or secondary navigation
  • Include links to relevant posts from category, product, service pages of the site.
  • Include link to blog in email signature

Blog Promotion – Organic
If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, some SEO best practices are already done for you, thanks to the WordPress development team. But here are some very important key points that you should remember while creating your blog content.

  • Make sure blog content is included in Sitemap.xml
  • May need to create it’s own sitemap.xml
  • Register and validate blog with blog directories. As a starting point, here is a list of 23 blog directories to submit your blog to.
  • Link to other blogs and bloggers on your blogroll to give link love so you can get link love <3
  • Enable commenting with registration. Comments are great user generated content and extend a conversation on a topic.
  • Make registration mandatory as well as utilize “rel-nofollow” on any links in comments to minimize spam.
  • Add a social sharing widget to the blog. Many social sharing apps are available – we use the DiggDigg floating share side bar.

SEO Comic

Blog Feed Strategies and Tactics
RSS feeds are critical to automate the syndication of content from your blog. Many people rely on RSS feeds for news and giving them this access might take the place of an email newsletter.

Tip: Create feeds at both the top level and ALSO at the category level. The category level will be more targeted and drive more links back to the site at deeper level pages.

Tip: Include the feed subscription link in a contact us module at the top of the right rail or left rail (depending on your template configuration).

Blog Promotion – More Ideas
Clearly, content is king today, and blogging is a great tool to get your message out. But content alone won’t get the job done. To make your blog a success, you’ve got to market it. Here are more ideas on ways to promote your blog.

  • Guest Posting
  • Give away good blog content to others with links/attribution back to you
  • Advertising
  • Broader communication platform than just your product/service.
  • Adwords, Adsense, StumbleUpon, Facebook
  • Network with Others
  • Comment on other people’s blogs and forums with your URL in signature
  • Respond to people commenting on your blog
  • Email bloggers when you post something you think they will like
  • Social Media
  • Promote blog posts through your Twitter, Facebook, etc. with short URL

What else have you done to promote your blog?

Stay tuned for the last post in this series, Metrics and Resource Requirements!

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