How to Get People to Read Your Business Blog
You’ve made a well-considered decision to open and maintain a business blog because it meets your business goals. You have a monster list of content ideas, and are doing well at maintaining your publication schedule. You’ve avoided the major blogging mistakes. So where’s your traffic? Why isn’t everyone flocking to ooh and aah over your beautiful new baby?
You certainly aren’t the first to ask this question, and you won’t be the last. Everyone wants traffic and the competition for eyeballs is fierce. But there are plenty of ways to engage the battle, and Calvert Creative can help you with nearly all of them.
Here’s our initial list of ways to get people to read your business blog. There are plenty more where these came from! Give us a call (toll free: 877-495-6851) if you need more help getting traffic to your business blog.
1. Publish on a regular schedule.
We recently posted the number one way to kill your business blog: don’t write! (Click here to read the whole post, which has some creative ways to make meeting your blog publishing schedule a bit easier.) Your potential customers need to believe that you are trustworthy and can be counted on to deliver what you promise. What you do on your blog will reflect on how you run your business. So keep your business blogging promises, and be there with fresh, valuable content when you’ve taught people to expect it.
2. Make it easy to share your content.
Too many business owners are jealous about sharing. We live in an age of open source, crowd source, and viral content. Stop worrying so much about whether or not people are copying your content or sharing your expertise, and instead maintain alerts on your content so that you can thank people for spreading the word about you. You can enable good pass-it-along practices by adding sharing buttons (for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, email, etc.) to every page your content.
3. Master at least one social platform.
Part of spreading the word about your business blog is about how well you can share the information yourself. Your business (and the people who work for your business) have friends and followers on various social platforms, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or somewhere else. If you don’t have any external business profiles online, choose the one that best meets your business marketing goals and get it started. Set up a regular drip of links and information about your business blog and you’ll begin to see the traffic flow.
4. Go comment on related sites.
Other business blogs in your field may be far more established. In fact, if you keep a weather eye on your competition, you already know where they are and how they’re faring. Instead of having a hostile attitude toward these businesses and their blogs, try taking a friendly angle. Comment on their sites in a positive and sincere way, and add value and information whenever you can. Leave a link back to your own blog so that people can drop by and see how you’re doing things differently.
5. Build and use your email list.
Make it easy for people to sign up for your email list by offering valuable content and outstanding incentives (Here’s two posts on incentives or “carrots” for your landing pages, and these work well on blogs, too!). Once you have an initial set of content offerings on your business blog, you can include excerpts and links in your email newsletters so that the people on your list are encouraged to click through to see content that interests them.
6. Have Patience
More than anything, you will want to have patience as you develop a reliable traffic stream to your business blog. Organic search results take consistent time and effort to build, but they are well worth the effort. Give yourself at least six to twelve months to solidly establish your blog. Watch your analytics to see how well your keywords (and other metrics) are performing for you.
Contact Calvert Creative if we can help you, and keep up the great work!
