How to: Make Your Blog a Success 3 CommentsThursday, 1 November 2012  |  Cate

You’ve been writing your content, taking your photos and creating your videos and now you’re ready to start blogging.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Once you’ve created your blog posts you need to make sure people read them.  The belief ‘if you build it, they will come’ is naïve in today’s internet climate.  You will need to put aside some time to promote your blog and the posts you create.  Luckily there are many quick and easy ways to do this.  Just try some of our handy tips and you should see your readership rise.

Think about your content

Your posts need to be appealing to the reader otherwise they won’t come back. Don’t bombard them with pages and pages of text. It doesn’t look inviting and readers will be put off before they even start. It is also important to understand that people tend to scan large blocks of text online and will miss the point you are trying to get across. Break up your text by using the following…

• Bulleted or numbered lists
• Short, concise sentences
• Add in relevant photos, presentations or videos
• Highlight important information with bold text
• Add in links
• Don’t forget to use your keywords

Let your customers know

Your current customers and email sign-up users have already affirmed their interest in your brand. These are the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to say so take every opportunity to let them know you have a blog.

User generated content helps the customer engage with your blog on a more personal level. Think of it as another social network and encourage your customers to contribute. And, of course, it's also a great way to create content when you're all out of ideas.

• Give your loyal customers a new product for free and ask them to review it. Create a post with their comments.
• Offer them gift vouchers in exchange for a post about why they love your brand.
• Run a competition and post the results – challenge them to take a photograph or make a video about your products.
• Create a survey on Facebook about your brand or products and use the results to create a post.

Promoting on social media

A quick and easy area of promotion is social media. Start by adding links to specific posts on your own social profiles.

	Add a link to your posts on Twitter more than once but change the title each time		Add it to your personal profile, business page and relevant groups in Facebook
	Create a new board in Pinterest and pin your blog posts to it		Share with your circles in Google+ and make it available to everyone
	Share it on your LinkedIn profile and with the groups you belong to		Upload your videos to your YouTube profile and then embed them into your posts

You can also share your posts with the plethora of bookmarking sites online. The most popular ones are...

But there are many others such as Technorati, BuzzFeed and NewsVine. You may also find some that are related to your particular industry so have a search online.

Cast a wider net

You can reach even further across the internet by researching other blogs within your industry and connecting with them.

• Ask other bloggers, especially those who are big in your market, to link to your posts
• Comment on other blogs and add a link to yours at the bottom
• Join a blogging community like the ones below and share your posts

Blog Engage	Blog Catalog	Fuel My Blog

Sign up to syndication sites and automatically feed your posts out to many different sites and channels on the internet. These are really helpful, time saving utilities and can work, not only for blog posts, but also for other channels you want to promote.

Feed your posts to over 50 different channels across the web automatically with specific triggers using IFTTT	Submit your blog posts and see them appear on well-known news and magazine websites such as Mashable and Rolling Stone with Outbrain	Apply to have your posts distributed to sites such as USA Today and eHow with Demand Studios

Or why not look into self-publishing and earn money from your blog by making it available on Amazon’s Kindle Store, Apple’s iBooks or Barnes & Noble’s Nook. To publish your eBooks to a wide range of eReaders use a site such as Zinepal to create your eBook and sign up to BookBaby to distribute to it to numerous apps.

Quality, quality, quality…

As with all online content and promotion, it’s all about quality not quantity. Now you have lots of ideas about how to promote your blog but always remember to make sure the content is engaging first, even if this means you post less. Once you have the quality content, promote to quality external websites and people will be more likely to link to your blog and we all know Google loves quality links!