You’re Blogging, Now What?

You had been meaning to blog for months, maybe even years. Now you’ve finally started, and you’re even sticking to a schedule. Hooray! Now that you’re actually writing blog entries on a regular basis, what do you do with them?

And if you’re not blogging yet, these may be some great reasons for you to start.

Post to Your Social Media

Either manually or automatically, post links to your blog entries on your social media websites. That should include sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.

And don’t just limit yourself to your latest blogs. Go back through your archives, find some of the more timeless articles, and share them again. It will breath new life into them, and people who missed them the first time around will see them.

Want to do some of that automatically? To post new blog articles as they come up, you can use free services like twitterfeed.com or dlvr.it. You give up a little fine-tune control, but you don’t have to remember to post it.

Email In Your Newsletter

Use your blogs as material for your email newsletter. You can sign up for a free account with MailChimp, and set up your mailing list there if you haven’t already. Many of our clients are able to stay with the free MailChimp option for a long time, so their only investment in their newsletter is their time.

Once you’ve got that ready and are good to go, you can set up an individual email newsletter as a campaign. Be sure to include the following:

• Your extremely compelling blog article title as the newsletter subject.
• The very beginning of your article in the newsletter, cut off at an enticing spot with a “Read More” link.
• A relevant, interesting illustration that’s in both the newsletter and the article, so people will be compelled to click, and reassured they’re in the right place when they get there.

A doctor client of ours does this. For him, just one sale off his newsletter every few months makes it well worth his investment.

Share on Social Bookmarking Websites

A social bookmarking site is one that lets users submit the addresses of web pages, therefore sharing with others. Many of the sites let people vote and comment on the links.

Of course, you don’t just want traffic for traffic’s sake. Share your blog entry on a site where the audience is likely to match your target market.

And you may not want to share every single blog article, either. On certain sites, articles that are timeless (never out-of-date) do well. On others, articles that tie into current events do even better.

Write For Specific Prospects

Your blog articles can be used as sales tools. Write articles with specific prospects in mind, then send them a link to the article. Make sure it’s not too obvious that you were writing directly to them, as you don’t want to turn them off.

Write For Specific Products & Services

If you’re looking to promote specific products and services you provide, write an article about them. Make sure you stick to issues they solve rather than a list of features and benefits. People don’t care about what your products and services can do, they care about what they can do for them.

Write For Search Engines

Finally, it’s perfectly acceptable to blog for search engines, as long as you remember that people will read the article as well.

Really wish you ranked better for some phrase? Write a blog series on the topic. You can write several in a row, then use some of the other techniques we’ve shared to get the link out there, making search engines more likely to pick it up and rank it well.

Are You Not Blogging Yet?

You may have been meaning to blog, and want to take advantage of some of these. Have you been frustrated because you can’t find the time to write? Or maybe you have the time, but find it painful to write.

T&S to the rescue! We do provide blogging services. Of course, they may or may not be right for you. Feel free to contact us online or ate 405-285-0348 to see if it’s worth a conversation or not.