There have been a number of business blogging efforts that have been built on organic search traffic.
And that’s totally fine.
In fact, Ghost Blog Writers currently gets just about all new inquiries via organic search. The rest come from referrals from current clients.
That organic search traffic comes to both blog posts and to the main pages on the site. I feel that as time as passed and as we’ve earned trust with our blogging efforts that it’s lifted the reputation of the entire site so our main pages can rank.
It’s all connected.
For more, read the case study we created for our own blogging strategy.
It’s okay to look at SEO as part of a blogging promotion strategy, but there is more to it than that especially if you want quicker growth.
A Blogging Strategy
A blogging strategy, as we do it at GBW, is to identify the target reader (usually also the target customer) and find the questions that person is asking in relation to the industry. Then we answer those questions with blog posts.
We find that when you answer questions your target customer has that they develop a trust and appreciation for you. Since they’re you’re target customer and they now trust you they will then come to you when they are at the point when they need your product or service.
That approach seems to work well with all channels that can bring traffic to your blog and website.
Left alone, simply publishing posts on your blog can bring in SEO traffic over time. And it can also bring in traffic from social media and other channels and people discover your posts (usually via search) and share them with their followers.
And that’s fine, but most people we encounter want to boost their traffic in the short-term as well.
And that’s where a blog post promotion strategy comes in…
Blog Post Promotion
While your blog is building long-term SEO value for each post and for your site as a whole, there are other efforts you can do to promote your posts and earn traffic.
And this is certainly a good thing to do and really it’s a requirement. Because you don’t want to solely rely on organic search traffic alone. Things can change with any traffic channel and you want to be able to withstand any loss in traffic from any one channel.
A good blogging strategy begins with good content. My definition of good content is answering a question your target customer has in the best way possible so that the person is satisfied.
For some questions that might involve examples, stats and more and other times that will involve a list of items like industry software tools and other times it will involve a simple answer to a question.
You can get by with creating okay content and doing a killer job of promoting, but I think you need good content for a blogging strategy to be successful in the long run.
And you need good blog post promotion to be successful as well.
A Few Blog Post Promotion Tips
I’ve written on promotion a few times in the past so I’ll include a few tips and a few links as well:
1. Share your posts often. I see many that don’t share their blog posts often enough, usually one time right after it’s published. You don’t want to share just the title and the link over and over for the same post. Here is how you can share the same post 20+ times in different ways.
2. Don’t spread yourself too thin on social media. I much prefer to see businesses commit to one, maybe two social channels. Look to dominate one channel instead of trying to be okay on five channels.
3. Commit to regular emails. Our clients often send out monthly newsletters that contain various content like company updates, promotions and blog posts. You can also turn a series of blog posts into a download to attract new subscribers.
4. Co-create blog posts. It’s great to create your own content. You can share it with your audience. But co-create some content too so that the other person can share it with their audience and you can share it with yours. It exposes each of you to a larger audience.
5. 15 Advanced Ways To Promote A Blog Post On Social Media. A recent guest post I did.