As a kid, I used to imagine what it would be like if there was a secret passageway behind my bookshelf.
You know, one of those cool ones that activated by pulling on a certain book. The whole shelf would swing out into the room, revealing a secret space in behind.
My secret space would have been full of cushions and books. A little secret haven to escape into the books I loved without interruption.
The thing that fascinated me the most was the idea that it would have looked like any old bookshelf from the front. Anyone could have walked in the room and seen that front.
But, they would not know what lay behind unless I told them.
The other day when I was stuck in Auckland traffic, I was pondering strange things (as I usually do in traffic) and I got thinking about my secret space.
Suddenly, it hit me! Business blogs are like the secret space in behind the bookshelf.
Your website home page is the bookshelf front. Anyone can see it and lots of people know that it is there. It performs a very important function.
However, people don’t know about the treasure trove of information that hides behind it all in your blog pages unless you tell them about it!
Which is why I have put this piece together, to remind you that a blog by itself is not enough.
Here’s how you can reveal the secret space of your blog to your audience and invite them into the inner circle of your business audience.
Entry To The Secret Clubhouse
I know you have invested lots of time and energy into creating that blog article. For you, the culmination of the process is publishing it on your website.
But for your audience, you publishing the blog is the starting point of their journey.
And that is only if they know to look for it on your website.
Your audience are not mind readers. You need to tell them when you have published a blog so that they can go over and read it! Simply publishing is not enough. You also need to do some work to get eyes on the piece.
What You Need To Do After You Publish
Once that blog goes live on your website, it is time to get some eyes on it!
Often, business owners don’t complete this important step as they feel like they need to create another blog’s worth of content to promote the blog they have just written.
That just isn’t true!
Your blog post is a cornerstone piece of content. You can use what you have already written to post on your other marketing channels.
Here are the four things you need to do:
1: Share a link to the blog on all your social media pages
Schedule some posts to share the link as soon as you publish the blog and then again later in the month. Remember that only a small percentage of your audience will see the link, so don’t be afraid to share it more than once. Also, they won’t all be on the same platform, so share it multiple times on all your platforms.
2: Break the blog down into standalone social posts
Consistent messaging is key to drive home your marketing themes. The subheadings of your blog make the perfect long form social posts. Simply copy and paste from your blog to your social pages and tweak to ensure it works as a standalone piece of content. You can even include a link to your blog at the bottom of these posts for people who want to dive deeper into the ideas you are raising.
3: Make some graphics
Use some of the key ideas or standout sentences in your blog to create some graphics. Canva is a great tool for putting these graphics together if you don’t already have branded templates for your business.
4: Send it to your list
Once you have the social pages covered, it is time to hit your most important asset, your email list. Simply take the introduction you wrote for the blog, add a greeting and a sign off, then put that in the body of an email. Include a button that links through to the blog on your website and you have a newsletter ready to go. Don’t forget to add a call to action to the bottom of the email for people that are ready to buy from you now.
These 4 things are just the beginning of what you can do with your blog. For more ideas, grab my freebie resource right here.
SEO Is The Long Game
But, what about SEO? Yep, I know you have painstakingly spent time optimising your blog for SEO. And that will pay off. It will be catalogued by Google and start appearing in search results. But, that won’t happen right away.
SEO is more of a slow burning process. It takes time for each blog post to start generating organic traffic. In fact, it can take 6 months or more for your blog to start regularly generating that search result traffic.
So, that is why it is important to work on driving traffic to your blog the moment you publish it. By getting eyes on the piece early, Google will recognise it is a piece that people want to read and will be more likely to show it in search results.
It effectively helps you speed up the process of generating organic search traffic.
Get Some Help
While content marketing is an important part of your marketing calendar, it can be a time consuming process to create the words you need.
For that reason, you might choose to get some help putting all that content together. Partnering with a content writer like myself means you will have a blog, social and newsletter content delivered to your inbox every month.
It’s all crafted specifically for your business so will be perfect for attracting the right kind of readers, creating visibility in the marketplace, and generating leads.
Check out my blog content packages here or book a convenient time to chat with me.