There’s a lot of advantage today for brands to establish an online presence. Even as a direct seller in charge of your personal brand, you can get left behind if you aren’t utilizing the online resources that are available to you.
You may have already set up your social media accounts, and have a website and blog up as well. But are you making the most of your blog? Is it getting enough viewers and followers? Yes, you may have written some excellent blog posts that you’re sure your readers are going to love, but are you doing enough to promote your blog?
Though you can be putting great content out there, you may have forgotten another essential thing you need to do, which is to market that content. You’re not going to get any benefits if you update your blog frequently with excellent posts, but you don’t do anything to get that post read by people. Without any marketing, your great blog post is just going to sit there, ignored and unnoticed.
So what can you do to make the most of your blog? Here are some tips:
1. Use social media status updates
A great way to spread the word about your great blog post is to share it in your social media status updates. Though that sounds like an easy thing to do, remember that clicking the share button doesn’t mean that all of your friends and followers are going to see it, since it can quickly get buried in other people’s and brand’s status updates. So you may need to post multiple updates at different dates and times to ensure that you get the maximum visibility for your posts.
It’s a good idea though to vary your headlines so that people don’t get bored seeing the same status update multiple times. Also, you should tailor your updates to fit what the community likes to see for each social networking site you choose to share your blog post with.
Another way to is to find groups and brands within these social networking sites that may be interested in reading your blog post. You can post on their walls if allowed, and this can get you some excellent traffic toward your blog. Always make sure that your blog post is relevant to that group, and make sure that they do allow posting on their walls.
2. Use keywords and SEO
One of the best ways to increase traffic to your blog is to rank well in the search engines, and a pretty simple way to do this is to use keywords and SEO in your blog posts. Google offers a free keyword tool that you can use to search for the most common phrases that people are typing in the search engines, and you can try including them in your blog posts as well as your title and meta descriptions.
Also, remember that when it comes to SEO, links going to your posts also help you rank higher in Google and the other search engines. So it’s a good idea to take the time to go through other blog posts that are relevant to your topic and leave comments with your url linking back to your site. Make sure that your comment contributes to the conversation so that you don’t appear spammy, and this can also lead to readers of that blog visiting yours because they found your comment interesting enough. You can even link to a specific blog post of yours if it’s relevant enough to what was posted.
3. Build relationships with other bloggers
There’s a huge community of bloggers out there who enjoy helping each other out when it comes to spreading the word about interesting blog content. So it’s an excellent idea to build relationships with these bloggers so that eventually, you may be able to ask them to mention your post in their blog, or even do a guest post for them. Guest posts are a great way to get traffic to your blog, as you’ll be able to share in the popularity of that blog even for a short while.
There are also many powerful blogging communities where you can syndicate your content, make new friends and gain exposure for your blog. Examples of these are Blog Engage, Blog Interact, and Biz Sugar. This can definitely increase traffic to your blog and get you high quality backlinks going to your site.
These are just a few of the tips that you can use to promote your blog and get the most out of it. As a direct seller, it really helps to drive traffic to your site so you can gain exposure and potentially get new customers as well.
Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm and Director of Client Communities of Momentum Factor-focused on the direct selling industry. She helps create connection, credibility, community and cha-ching through mobile marketing and social commerce around your brand. She is co-founder of #brandchat – a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding.
