So you’ve selected your blog platform, identified your voice, and created a blogging schedule. Now what do you do? Sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in? Obviously not.

Whatever the goals of your blog - thought leadership, branding, reputation management, or even ‘me too’, you still have to work to get people to find your blog, and to find out whether what you’re doing is working or not.

So how do people find your blog? Well the easy answer is that you have to market it. You can do this through ‘traditional’ linking campaigns (directories, identifying and contacting sites that link to your competitors, identifying and contacting other niche sites that look like they would be a relevant fit with your audience / message, etc) or through social marketing campaigns (Digg, MySpace, Twitter, Newsvine, Sphinn, etc).

You can’t just put content out and hope it goes viral, as that can’t possibly happen until people see it to know how great your content is. So it is up to you to get the word out. The challenge is going to be to identify what will work with your audience and what won’t. Also don’t assume that your expected audience will be your actual audience, they may not be, so you should work to engage with your audience to determine how best to get your message across to them.

Once you have people visiting your site, you want to make sure that they come back again and again, the best way to do this is to make sure that you have an RSS feed set up for your blog. Anyone who wants to can then subscribe to your feed, and whenever you push out a new post, they are informed. Make sure that you make it easy for anyone to subscribe to your RSS feed. Place a button high up on your blog, and maybe even have some standard text that displays after every post that has a link to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Comments are a vital piece of a blog, without them you don’t really have a blog, you just have a web page that frequently updates. You should have a published comment policy that states that you’ll remove offensive and profane posts, but you shouldn’t just remove any negative comments, or comments that don’t agree with whatever position you’re taking in your blog. Instead you should use comments to engage your readers, and find out where they’re coming from. Be responsive, dialog with them in the comments, or even off the blog by emailing them. By engaging you’re truly taking advantage of the benefits of a blog.

After all that, your main blogging responsibility is simple, all you have to do is to keep pushing out the same quality content, on a regular schedule, keeping your subscribers happy, pulling in more and more new subscribers as you go, and watch your blog grow.

Filed under: Education and Training, SEO, Social Marketing on Monday, October 15th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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