If you haven’t heard, blogging is one of your greatest advertisements. (Actually, we think it’s even better than traditional advertising. Seriously.)
But while there’s huge potential for your blog to be your greatest tool to increase brand awareness, there are also A LOT of blogs out there. So how do you effectively use your blog to help more people get to know your brand?
1. Create offers. An offer is the most effective path for lead generation and your blog is a great place to share these offers and build buzz around them. Offers are premium pieces of content that your reader can get for free in exchange for his or her contact information. Offers are designed to guide your reader through your sales funnel and are the most effective way to turn a lead into a paying customer. Offers shouldn’t be product-centric (meaning focused only on the benefit of your product or service) but instead should share compelling information that meets a need or desire of your target audience. Some examples of types of offers you can create are ebooks, webinars, slideshows, templates, or free consultations.
2. Find guests to post on your blog. When you’re trying to widen your sphere of influence, it’s helpful to find others with an established audience who can share a post on your blog. Bringing in other bloggers with a different audience base is a great way to build awareness because not only will they be sharing valuable information with your readers, but they’ll (hopefully!) be promoting their post and their audience will be introduced to your company. The key to finding guest contributors is to not only find contributors who have a big audience and will bring you traffic, but who have an audience that is a good fit for your company so that it’s the RIGHT traffic coming to you.
3. Focus on keywords. If you want people to organically find your blog, having a keyword strategy in place is crucial. By making use of long tail keywords, you can center your blog content on keywords that your target audience is likely to be organically searching for. Having a plan in place for what keywords you can realistically rank for AND that your target audience will likely be looking for will help improve your rankings in organic search and greatly expand awareness about your product or service.
4. Curate content. Nobody likes people who ONLY talk about themselves. In the same vein, sharing only YOUR content on the blog isn’t nearly as effective as sharing content from other outside sources. Sharing other valuable resources position you as an expert in your industry, and shows your reader that you’re knowledgeable about what’s going on in your industry. It’s also an opportunity to earn the trust of your readers because sharing other content shows them you understand what problems they face and that you have solutions for them.
5. Use blog traffic to drive traffic to other parts of your website. Your blog posts should usually end with some kind of a Call to Action. This Call to Action should be strategically designed to drive readers to other parts of your site. Perhaps it’s asking people to click on an offer, or maybe it’s driving traffic to a video that you have on your website or to other information about your product or service. Regardless of what this Call to Action is, capitalize on the traffic your blog is bringing you to direct readers to other informational pages on your website. If your blog is the introductory handshake that you give your audience, your website is the next step to inviting them in to get to know you better.
About the Author:
Katie Humphreys is co-founder and Chief Action Officer of Plume & Post. Find more musings from Katie on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.