Implement a Blog Marketing Strategy

Blog implementation—Step 4 of 4

Search engines are now the number one way that people find things on the Web, so good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to any marketing strategy. Promote each new postto help your audience find it, and integrate multimedia and social channels into your overall communications and marketing strategy.

Implement good search engine optimization (SEO)

• Summarize each post in the first sentence, since this brief description will show in search results. A good summary at the top will encourage click-throughs.
• Use descriptive links that help your readers know what your post is about. Research has shown that if people don’t know what they might get, they usually won’t click on a link.
• Link to related posts elsewhere on your blog, to keep readers engaged and reading more of your information.
• Encourage syndication with an RSS feed, and make it easy for others to republish your information on their websites.
• Use keywords, common words and phrases favored by your audience, so they’re more likely to find your blog when they search.  Include keywords that will help your site perform well for specific searches.
• Read more tips on the SEO page.

Marketing tips

• Use social networks to promote a new post.
• Add your blog’s feed to your agency social network pages, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace.
• Use Twitter and other microblogs to give your followers short updates and share links and videos.
• “Ping” your posts to announce to search engines and feeds that you’ve updated your blog. Two free and easy-to-use pinging services are:
  • Ping-o-matic!
  • Pingoat
• Use social bookmarking sites to share your blog with others.  Examples:
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Delicious

• Comment on related blogs to drive traffic back to your blog
  • Find the most popular blogs on Technorati

• Include a “call to action” so readers know what to do next after reading a post.  For example, ask them to:
  • Sign up for your newsletter
  • Tweet about the post
  • Share on social media platforms (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)

That’s it for the Implemtation phase. Now learn how to make your blog even better. First up: institute regular content reviews.

Review all steps at a glance on the How to Blog page.

Content Lead: Justin Herman
Page Reviewed/Updated: May 12, 2012