How to Market New Blogs

Plenty of new B2C and B2B blogs are launched every day and the sheer volume of content makes standing out increasingly difficult. My personal experience as a B2B Marketing pro, is that blogs can be one of the most effective ways create connections with prospects and customers through useful content. However, that content will go unnoticed unless you promote it. To that end, here are 12 tips for marketing a new blog.

1.     Add A Link is a company blog, or if its attached to another site, add a link to the blog from the main navigation on the parent website.

2.     Create A Badge On the main website, add a badge to the homepage, or sidebar, that promotes the blog. Images are a good way to catch a visitors attention.

3.     Email  Add a link to the blog in your email signature.

4.     Newsletter  Announce the blog in the company newsletter.

5.     Network  Announce the blog to your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Linked in connections and any other social networks that you are apart of.

6.     Press Release  If you feel that the blog is important enough to support a press release, put one out.

7.     Submit  Submit the blog to blog & feed directories.

8.     Share  Share your blog with co-workers, friends and others in your network. You never know when they might promote it for you.

9.     Link  One way to get other bloggers to notice you is to link to them. Summarize someone elses long blog post, expand upon someone's shorter post, or just write your thoughts on a topic that someone else wrote about and link back to the original post.

10.   Give Away  If it's a product blog, run a promotion on the blog giving away one of your products. Sometimes the value that can come out of giving something away can be more beneficial than all the items above.

11. Guest Post If there are other blogs in your industry, ask around and see if theyd allow you to guest post for them. In return, youd get a link back to your blog in your profile, or post, on their site.

12.   Ask Tap into the social networks within the industry youre trying to reach and ask them what theyre interested in. Heres an example of a post that did just that on Twitter for this blog. Show interest in the interest of your audience and theyll pay more attention and share your content.

Of course, there’s no substitute for good content, so even the best blog marketing tactics will be fruitless unless those visitors find something useful AND the blog publisher has made it easy to share that content. This is a simple, yet effective formula at the center of our blog marketing services.

What tips and tactics have you found to be effective for promoting a new blog?