Do you have a BDS?

Blogging for business on a regular basis can be beneficial. But how are you actually getting those articles to your ideal clients? What is your BDS, your Blog Delivery System?

Hope is not a system! Let’s look at some components a successful BDS could utilize.

Email Newsletter

Rather than save the best for last, let’s talk about what is potentially the most powerful method first. Using an email newsletter as part of your BDS allows genuinely interested people who liked your blog article to say, “I like what you’re saying, so please let me know when you have more to say.”

Toward the top of your email, simply put the title of your blog article, the hero image, an excerpt, and a link that says “Read more.”

If you like tracking the effectiveness of your email marketing (who doesn’t?), this gives you another way to do that. You can track how many people click through to your full blog article.

Direct Emails

Hopefully you’re already having conversations with potential new clients, donors, strategic partners, or volunteers. Be sure you’re providing value.

One way to do that is to look through your past blog articles and find one that would benefit a specific person you’ve talked with. Then email the link to them directly, writing something like this:

Clark,

I enjoyed our conversation the other day about email marketing. You had asked about growing your email list, so I thought this article I wrote a while back might interest you:

https://tandsgo.com/2015/02/grow-email-list/

Let me know if you have any questions!

Social Media Updates

If you use WordPress, you can actually set up social media updates to go out as soon as your blog is published. One option is to use the plugin Jetpack, enable the Publicize feature, and connect your social media accounts. Then each time you write a blog article, be sure to customize the message that goes with it.

Many recommend sharing on social media multiple times when a blog is first published, especially on Twitter.

You can (and should) share older blog articles as well! I like to use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the blog articles we’ve published here on the T&S blog and when we share them. That way, I can be sure we share and re-share the important ones on a regular basis.

Paid Social Media Advertising

It seems obvious that you can use paid social media advertising for promotional content. But have you considered using it to promote your informational blog articles as well?

All the major social media sites have some sort of paid advertising option. For blog promotion, consider:

• Facebook Boosted Posts
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Pinterest Promoted Pins

LinkedIn Posts

LinkedIn allows members to publish long-form content on their website in the form of LinkedIn Posts. Similar to blog articles, these are set up for you to further establish your expertise.

At the end of your LinkedIn Post, consider promoting a related blog article on your own website. I published an article titled, The Risk with Email List-Building Shortcuts. At the end, I included the following:

Was this article useful? Read another article Tim wrote, 4 quick email newsletter improvements.

If you’re already blogging weekly (or more frequently), and LinkedIn is already a good fit for what you do, consider writing one additional article each month and publishing it to LinkedIn. Then use that to promote specific articles on your own website.

Guest Blogging

While guest blogging may or may not be beneficial from an SEO standpoint any longer, it can still be a great way to get more of your ideal prospects reading your blog articles.

Find another website that has a blog, whose ideal reader seems to overlap with your ideal reader. Get in touch with the owner of that website, and suggest a topic that would be a great fit for their audience and yours.

Of course, be sure that they’ll let you link back to your website. Then instead of a general link, mention a specific related blog article, and link straight to that article.

One guest blogger we had write on our blog just used a link back to his home page, and was able to convert 22% of the visitors that clicked through from his blog article into email newsletter subscribers in the first three days. How many more visitors could he have had if he’d linked to a specific article?

SEO?

You may have noticed that I didn’t suggest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a specific BDS component. Congratulations, you’re very observant!

Let’s assume that your blog is set up well from an SEO standpoint, and that you’re blogging about topics that appeal to your target market and fit with your organization. SEO becomes a side effect of great content combined with a great Blog Delivery System (BDS).

Take Action!

Hopefully you’re already using at least one of these. But more likely than not, you saw something you aren’t already using. Which one of these strategies can you start using now?