With our 15 Best Practices for Business Blogging guide you may think you know all there is to know about becoming a professional blogger. And of course, those tips are great, but when you aren’t developing remarkable content, what else can you be doing with your blog? There are so many different ways things you can do besides blogging that will help you build a successful blog, and it’s not always just content-related.
In today's post, we're sharing 8 blog ideas you can use to help increase your presence, besides actually blogging! From increasing the number of blog subscribers to testing new offers, we will show you the ways you can get more out of your blog without typing until your hands go numb.
Blog Idea #1 - Increase the Number of Subscribers
Start by accessing your analytics to see where your blog traffic is coming from. This will tell you if your readers are coming through social media, “organic” search, direct-traffic, email or premium content offers. Whatever the source may be, focus on how you can provide opportunities for them to subscribe to the blog.
You can start increasing the number of subscribers through secondary calls-to-action (CTAs), a blog subscription landing page, and a call-to-action in your email marketing that will bring them right to your blog, or a custom tab on your Facebook business page. All of these are simple additions, and they will be worth it for growing your web presence!
Blog Idea #2 - Update your CTAs
Replace old CTAs with new ones to ensure they remain effective. As we've mentioned before, we like to TEST everything. For example, if you have an existing CTA that isn't generating leads or subscribers, perhaps it’s time to make some changes. Try different text, different colors, different placement even. Don't try everything at once, test one change at a time so you can see how it affects your results.
Blog Idea #3 - Leverage your Blog as one of your best Sales people
Your blog is a powerful tool – since you are investing so much time in developing remarkable content, start leveraging it for other things, like supporting your sales team. Leverage your blog as a sales tool by giving your audience something that is relevant to their life and helps to solve their problems. If you provide content that helps them, educates them, or makes them feel accomplished, your subscribers will be compelled to continue to read your content and will keep coming back for more!
As your subscribers become more engaged, you need to be sure you're providing opportunities for conversion through relevant CTAs and similar articles.
Blog Idea #4 - Use your Blog to Test New Offers
We all use email to test new offers; however, if you email your contacts too frequently, they might being to regard your communications as spam, and you will see a decrease in the number of subscribers. Instead of using traditional email to test all of your content offers, try to promote them on your blog. Once you have tested new offers and analyze the results, you can then determine which ones to send to your email contacts.
Blog Idea #5 - Network with other Bloggers
Another great way to build engagement is to build relationships with other bloggers. Why would you want to network with other bloggers? – Its simple! If you make friends and connect with bloggers who produce similar or related content, you can share links to their articles and vice-versa.
Just imagine how many other people you can reach by having your link shared on a number of different blogs. Start by sending them an email referencing something you enjoyed in their blog post. A personalized message will be a great conversation starter and will encourage them to network with you.
Blog Idea #6 - Tell a Story with a Visual
Visual content is a very powerful marketing tool. Since readers are naturally more attracted to images over text, it’s highly beneficial to start considering the use of visuals. A popular visual tactic being used right now is infographics. Infographics are a great way to display your content in a visual way - especially if you can show statistics, graphics and charts.
Another visual idea for your blog is to leverage the insanely popular, visual-based social media platform Pinterest. We recommend creating a pinboard specifically dedicated to your blog. Pin the images you use in your blog posts to promote and drive more traffic to your posts.
Blog Idea #7 - Leverage Social Media
There are many different ways to use social media to increase blog traffic. Some of our favorite ways include:
- Encouraging your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to re-tweet and share.
- Embed links to your blog posts in your social media posts and ask your audience to share your post. From there, your readers can spread the word about your content.
- Make sure you post a link to your blog posts on all of your social media sites, especially LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
The more channels your blog content is viewed on, the better chance of gaining more subscribers, leads and ultimately customers.
Blog Idea #8 - Optimize Past Blog Posts
Current content isn't necessarily your greatest content, there could be old posts that are true gems, but have been pushed to the side. As you continue to improve your strategy, it helps to also optimize old blog posts that might not follow your new best practices.
Sort through your analytics and see which topics and posts your audience is responding to, then spend time determining old posts that first these topics and which keywords are going to drive the most traffic to those blog posts. Once you make a few updates, old content will seem like new again to your subscribers.
Creating remarkable content is going to be highly beneficial to attracting traffic and generating leads; however there are many things you need to consider besides writing content! How are you using your blog to do things besides blogging?
Tag(s):
Demand Generation
