Want to get more marketing juice out of your business blog?
Don't tell me - the answer is... Yes!
Ha - knew it!!
Sooooo... what should you be doing on that good old blog of yours - BESIDES blogging?
Here are FIVE big ideas you can implement in FIVE minutes or less... and generate some pretty serious results FAST.
1. Optimize past post titles. Based on your keyword and search engine optimization strategy, you probably have some great blog content with titles that are not optimized. For example, as a marketing speaker and marketing coach, two of my SEO key words (in case you couldn't tell!) are marketing speaker and marketing coach.
Sometimes, I'm good about including those keywords in my blog titles right when I post them. For example:
Marketing Speaker: 5 Books You Oughta Buy NOW
and
Marketing Coach: 17 Ways to Drive More Traffic FAST
And sometimes, I'm not. For instance:
23 things to say when you're asked for 'free consulting'
and17 great answers to 'How much do you charge?'
So if you go back to some of your older posts and change the titles to be more in line with your SEO keyword strategy, you'll attract new traffic and more traffic to your older (and probably underappreciated!) posts.
2. Add or update Calls to Action on your posts - including adding or updating the calls to action on your most popular posts which continue to generate a healthy volume of regular traffic.
A call to action is NOT a sales pitch - it's a way to OFFER value and INVITE engagement. For example, good calls to action for your business might include:
- Subscribe to get regular updates
- Download this free eBook
- Get a free assessment
- Contact us for a No-BS initial consultation
- Take an interactive quiz
- Register for this free teleseminar
- Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
This is the simplest and fastest path to convert visitors to leads to sales.
3. Reblog your golden oldies. If a topic worked really well, got a lot of comments, inbound links, and social media love the first time around, it may be time to revisit that topic.
Grab your old content and use that as a starting point for an updated new post - using 80% of the proven material from before and simply adding to it, enhancing it with newer examples, adding video, audio or other multimedia enhancements like Slideshare or Animoto.
Add links to resources from other experts that relate directly to your content. Make sure to optimize the post's title, tags, categories and metadata to get some zesty Google juice, choose an eye-catching photo or graphic from Shutterstock.com or your favorite stock photo site and boom - you're done!
4. Use your blog to test new offers. Sometimes you want to put an offer out there to see what kind of response it might generate WITHOUT hitting your email list with a blast that might send more of your subscribers scurrying for the "Unsubscibe" button.
Your blog is a great place to send up "trial balloons" for new products, new services, new programs and new investable opportunities that you're not 100% sure are ready for major promotion via your ezine or email marketing efforts.
It's perfectly OK to "soft sell" occasionally - or even better, launch a short 3-question survey - on your blog to gauge your audience's interest in working with you in a new way.
5. Review older posts and find places to cross-promote your newer blog posts, your social media postings, your Flickr photos, your YouTube videos, or your other multimedia assets.
This is a great opportunity to build what are called "internal links" - links from one of your web pages or blog posts to another - to create a "web" of interlinked content and to boost the SEO of your overall site using anchor text that describes the content you are pointing people to.
For example, you might add the following to your older blog posts:
- Check out this YouTube video on effective business card design
- Here's another post you might like titled "What is inbound marketing?"
- Here's a screencast about How to Generate 10X Traffic on LinkedIn
- Want to get better at generating referrals? Read this post on Building Your Referral Blurb
Tags: blogging for business, business blogging, doit marketing, marketing speaker, marketing coach
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Use the COMMENTS area below to leave your advice, insights and recommendations on these ideas to breathe new life into your blog...
