Small businesses and blogs often struggle in building a great blog audience who loves to read their work and avail their products and services. Larger businesses often market through mainstream media like television, print, billboards, and activations. Smaller businesses and blogs struggle in promoting their actionable content and their services or products to their audience. That is when social media steps in. There are some key ways to promote your business and your blog without having to break the bank!
Start Your Promotion From Home
More often than not, blogs and businesses come up with great services, solutions, products, and content. But it keeps sitting on the shelves or websites waiting for someone to show up. Promotion of the brand, however, starts from home. Bring out your social media profiles, and actively promote your services and posts with your friends and family. If they are part of the audience profile you came up with, then these are the first step towards building a blog audience. Even though sometimes, they may not share the same view of how great your brand is, or could be, building numbers on your blog, product or service, can help build a better word of mouth.
Work On Your Personal Profile
Build and perfect your own personal profile first. Share your business profile URLs within your own profile, populate your about us section with key details of your business, and mention the kind of products and services you offer. Your personal profile should be a visual landscape of your business so that people can relate you to your business easily. Even if you do not portray yourself as a brand or a person behind your brand, you can still mark the products and services on your personal profile, to denote your support for them. Promote key elements of your business and your blog on your personal profile to indicate your support as well.
Start Building A Network
Building a network online and offline can be key in generating leads, building a blog audience, and promoting your brand to your target audiences. Networking can help with recall as people start recognizing the brand. This brand recall can become stronger the more you participate online as well as offline in the communities where your target audiences are found. For example, there are several groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and communities across different forums where your target audiences may hang out. Work to build a strong network in these communities, by helping answer queries, talking to people in general, and communicating with the audiences.
Participate In All The Right Places
While networking would indicate hanging out where your audiences are, and getting to know them. Participation would often involve you to be in places that your audiences would be. For example, if your audience profile is such that they would be found amongst social media channels such as LinkedIn and Snapchat that most businesses never think about, then, by all means, participate and use these channels. If you are actively participating in channels that are the right fit with your blog audience, then you can continue to reap benefits as more visitors come on to your website.
Engage With Your Target Audience
While engagement and networking on social media platforms will bring you most of your audience, you should also consider engaging with your target blog audience on other platforms and forums. Social Media is one key to the larger scheme of finding and collecting audience. Another key is finding the audience on forums and communities where engagement can be done through answering questions, posting questions, and sharing anecdotes and stories. With this engagement, your net worth is built and your expertise is highlighted. Quora is a general forum where all sort of audience is found. You can conduct a basic Google Search to find communities that resonate with your brand, to find more audiences there.
Claim Your Name
While social media can be a great audience builder, a key tip that most entrepreneurs fail to realize is that your name should be standard across all platforms. This includes your domain name, your social media channel names across different mediums, and your profiles. A singular name can help in finding your social media pages/profiles quickly rather than having to hunt through them. This can build familiarity amongst your audience for an easier transition from your social media page or profile to your website.
Get Yourself Published
Most small businesses have found their audiences and claim to fame, through getting published in larger publications. If you prefer to have your name out there amongst your key visitors, then aim to get published. Some key publications that take in articles from various bloggers and businesses include Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc.com, BuzzFeed, and more. You should also use mediums such as LinkedIn and Medium to build your and your brand’s online presence. It helps when a person searches out on the search engine and comes across details that build your online presence and display you as an expert or a knowledge leader in your field.
Don’t Forget Local Networking
While most businesses work on building a seamless social media presence, local networking is often forgotten. A lot of your audience can come directly from word of mouth. Find out local networking groups, volunteering options, churches, and meetups that you can go to. These have people who are generally going to be like-minded. They will be more in tune based on the kind of audience profile you have created. These audiences can be a great boost in terms of word of mouth for your business as well as your blog.
Get Your Business Cards Out
Business cards are often the least used item in a small business or blog. But they can bring about a great boost to your blog if used in the right manner. A business card generally should contain social media channel IDs as well for the receiver to relate to your social media presence. Business cards can help you connect with your audience. They are a great help in brand recall when the receiver views the card again. Both physical and digital business cards can help in this case.
Get Your Audience To Share
Once your audience is visiting your blog or your website, the next step is to add options that allow your audience to share your goodness with the world. If you use a WordPress website, there are some key plugins that allow you to create toolbars for social media sharing. Similarly, for other websites built on other platforms, you can build social media sharing toolbars that allow your audience to share your posts, products or services on their profiles.
Add Click to Tweet Options
A key trick that quite a few blogs have used recently for good measure is the Click to Tweet Option. You can also build this feature in your blog through plugins and codes. A specific phrase or sentence can be converted into a tweet and embedded into your content. The audience can readily share that piece on their Twitter profile by clicking on the Click To Tweet button. This way, your content is shared with the world, without significant effort from the audience itself. You can leverage social media profiles of your readers to get more audience onto your website this way.
Don’t Forget Lesser Used Channels
More often than not, you can find your blog audience on social media channels that you may personally not be using. For example, some audience may be available on Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn. Usually, we may use these channels as a user but not as a small business owner or a blogger. However, these are great hubs to find great audience profiles and build your social media presence. For example, Pinterest is a key tool that a lot of people use to search for relevant content. You can leverage this idea by promoting your products, services and blog posts directly to your blog audience, on Pinterest boards for people to find, share and redirect to your website!
