Small Business Blogging And Using Social for Marketing It–The Finale!
To culminate the ideas we’ve presented to you about small business blogging and to bring this mini-series to a grand finale–there is no better place to end then with a complete guide on how you should be uses of social media for marketing your small business blogging. Up until this point, we’ve given you a clear path to begin some perfect content writing that will both engage your readers and impress Google. How much good would it be for us to get you to this point without equipping you with solid knowledge for promoting your well-written and highly keyword-optimized content? Not so much. This is because, without uses of social media for marketing your blog, you’re missing out on a huge key to gaining more traffic to your blog pages (and remember–you’re competitors are on their game!)
Uses of Social Media for Marketing is Win-Win
We like to think of Social media as a giant win-win situation. Your readers will love you for uses of social media for marketing your blog. And Google will love you even more for uses of social media for marketing your blog! How so? We would love to explain. The two major parts to uses of social media for marketing your small business blogging can be simply separated by your readership and your authority on Google. Let’s begin by breaking down the steps you’ll need to take to make sure you’re making your readers happy.
Uses of Social Media for Marketing Your Blog | Building Readership
Your readers are of course the most important part of this equation, and uses of social media for marketing will be gratifying only if you’re gratifying them. In the context of small business blogging, here are ways that you can attract the right customers and keep them interested in what you have to say.
Creating Profiles That Are Professional As you’re uses of social media for marketing your small business blogging, your content is niche specific. As a blogger for business-related content, you must exercise and show your expertise. When you set up your profile, you’re going to want to make sure your profile is complete and displays your authority within your niche. Show to your audience why you are qualified to write about your market and, at the same time, try to stand out from the crowd. Chances are your competitors are uses of social media for marketing and trying to attract the same audience, so let your expertness shine through clearly and creativity. From your business profile to the content you publish, keep professionalism in mind, but attractiveness at the forefront of your efforts
. Creating Profiles That Are Relevant for Targeting Your Audience. You know that to get the most out of small business blogging, your content must be written to engage your audience. Your profile must also be set up in order to promote to the right audience.
1. Choose to create profiles on social media sites where you will find your target audience. Although Facebook is good for marketing just about anything, Facebook is geared more towards a friendship mindset when sharing. In comparison, the social atmosphere of Twitter is much different, whereas, quick bursts of informative links and content are what is being shared and across a much broader, less acquainted with audience.
2. Connect with your target audience. Make searches to find people on the site who would be interested in your product or services. Think about making searches for your product, service, industry, but also other related industries. Chances are that there are already groups out there and discussions happening related to the topics you discuss in your blog. Join groups that you find that are related to your niche and jump in the conversation. If you can’t find any groups that are relevant, create your own and invite others to join you! When you find people discussing your products or services, don’t hesitate to actually interact with them and make direct messages. Social media sites are about being social, so take the initiative to be friendly, socialable, and informative. If you can add value to a conversation, your authority will greatly increase.
Publishing Content When you publish content on your social media sites, make sure that you’re not just focusing on promoting. uses of social media for marketing yourself and yourself solely is a huge turn-off to many potentially interested readers. Publish your blog posts using the 80/20 rule, with about 20% of your social sites’ content as promotional materials. Update your audience with news, articles, pictures, facts, and other content that would interest them. As you should know by now, content is king. From your blog posts to social media updates, your content needs to add value to your audience. If you follow these steps, you’ll do just that, creating a win-win situation between you and your audience. If you need more content writing help, you can refer to Part 2 of our mini-series on Small Business Blogging.
Uses of Social Media for Marketing Your Blog | Building Authority
The only win-win relationship in small business blogging isn’t just between you and your audience–but you can include Google too. Google loves relevant information. Google loves authoritative information. If you’ve built a strong foundation for your first win-win relationship, it will even help you with this one too.Creating Social Media Profiles for Authority Taking advantage of social media sites for their authority is a critical component of creating a full-throttle Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plan for your business blog. In Part 3 of Small Business Blogging, we offered some incredibly helpful ways for promoting your blog in order to build authority for it. As you already know, Google judges and ranks sites based on their authority, so in order to get any kind of traffic from the search engines, you must gain authority. In addition to the tactics I already discussed, you can also leverage social media sites. 1. uses of social media for marketing your blog goes beyond gaining traffic from making updates that link to your blog post, but by simply having a backlink to your blog post on a social media site, you will increase your blog posts’ authority, and therefore gain traffic from ranking highly in search engines. 2. Take advantage of not only the top social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and on-the-rise Google+, but all kinds of social media sites. However, the trick here is to not just set up these profiles and spam your links. You will create a negative social outlook. But rather, provide valuable information and socially interact and you will have a positive outlook, plus a fantastic link profile. 3. Don’t forget to ping all of the social media site pages where your link is found. When you ping pages, Google will be able to index your links faster, and you will in turn, start seeing traffic sooner.
Sharing is Caring A huge component to uses of social media for marketing your blog is social bookmarking and sharing. This is the greatest part of probably the entire social media spectrum, because it does the work you. Or we should say, your readers do you work for you. When one of our visitors read this article and enjoy what they’ve read, they will probably tweet it or perhaps share it on Linkedin. When this happens, this blog post gains a backlink just in the same way as if I had shared the post’s link on Facebook myself. By inciting your readers to bookmark or share your content, you will be doing yourself tremendous favors. Your probability of this increases based on two things: good content and easy sharing buttons. As we mentioned in our post about our favorite WordPress plugins, Digg Digg and Sociable are two great plugins for social sharing buttons if you’re using WordPress.