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Best of 2008 – 11 Tips for Getting Readers for your Business Blog

readerpedrosimoes7You’ve set up a blog for your business and started writing.  Now, how do you get readers?

  1. Content, Content and more Content – Did I mention content?  The only way to attract and keep readers is with great content.
  2. Share – You started a business because you have some specialized expertise.  Share that expertise with your readers.  They will respect your efforts and look to you for advise.
  3. Consistency – Readers need to know that there’s a reason to check back from time to time.  Choose a posting schedule and try to stick with it.  Ideally, you should be posting at least once a week.
  4. Stay on Target – While straying off the path occasionally is ok, readers generally expect you to post on a certain subject matter (whatever your expertise is).  You may want to keep a personal blog for other posts (remember you’re representing your business).
  5. Listen & Respond – Encourage readers to interact with you through comments and email.  Listen to what they say and respond intelligently.  Your blog should be a place to have a conversation with your customers.
  6. Be Helpful – Related to #5, anywhere you see a question you can answer, answer it.  Help people out with problems and concerns, not just on your blog, but anywhere you see people post their issues.  If it’s something you can write about on your blog, you’ll also help out others who may have the same problem.
  7. Market – Add links to your blog on your website, your business card, your brochures, your email signature, and anywhere else you can.  You’ll need to let customers know that you have a blog.
  8. Be Social – Join social networks and socialize with the members.  Most social networks will also allow you to link to your website and blog.  Some will even automatically import posts from your RSS feed.
  9. Blogosphere – Read other industry blogs and comment on their posts.  Link to posts you think your readers would be interested on.  Write opinions about posts on your own blog.
  10. Keywords & SEO – Don’t go overboard trying to get keywords into your posts, but do take good SEO practices into account.  Knowing the keywords you want to target can help you incorporate them into your posts.
  11. Patience – It takes time to grow a readership on a blog.  It can take over a year to get a decent following, so don’t expect your blog to take off right away.  It takes a regular commitment to great content and a lot of patience.

(photo by pedrosimoes7 @ Flickr CC)

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8 Places to Syndicate Your Business Content

broadcastsoundman1024Now that you understand RSS, you can use it to syndicate your content to other places on the Internet.  Part of your content strategy should be syndicating or publishing your content in multiple places online.  The more places you can use the same piece of content, the more return you’ll get for your effort. Here are some places to consider:

  1. Twitter – Using Twitterfeed you can automatically tweet the title and a link to any of your content (website, blog, delicious) that has a RSS feed.
  2. LinkedIn – LinkedIn has added the ability to add blog and twitter content (both of which have RSS feeds) right to your LinkedIn profile.
  3. FaceBook – There is a Twitter application that will send your tweets right to your Facebook page (as status updates) and with Notes you can have any RSS feeds show up as well.  If you create a page for your business, you can have your content show up there as well.
  4. BlogCatalog – A social network to connect with other bloggers, use your rss feeds to syndicate content from twitter, your blog, delicious, etc.
  5. MyBlogLog – Another social network to connect with other bloggers.
  6. FriendFeed – An easy way for your friends and connections to see all of your content from various sources in one place.
  7. Plaxo – A Business social network, you can syndicate content from your blog, twitter, etc. using your RSS feeds.
  8. Your Social Networks – Many social networks will allow you to add a feed to your content.  If not, consider copying and pasting your content to show up on your social networks.

The more places your content is, the higher chance you’ll be able to provide some useful information to a potential customer.  Keep in mind that your content needs to be useful to others – not just marketing or PR.

(photo by soundman1024 @ Flickr CC)

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RSS – Syndicate Your Content

syndicationcogdogblogRSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to automatically syndicate your content in ways that other people can easily read or aggregate it.  RSS is formatted in XML which allows your feed to be published once but viewed by many different programs.  If you have a blog on WordPress or Blogger (and others) or use Twitter, then you already have RSS feeds.  If you subscribe to blogs using Google Reader or iGoogle, you are subscribing to the RSS feeds from these blogs.

RSS is largely invisible to most people.  As I mentioned above, you may already be using RSS feeds without being aware of them.  However, just knowing you have RSS feeds with various content services means you can easily use these feeds to syndicate your content to wider audiences (which we’ll discuss in the next post).  To see if a webpage has an RSS feed, you can look for links which say “subscribe to this blog” or “subscribe to this website”.  Sometimes the feeds will also just say “RSS” or have a icon that looks like this: A website may have a feed, but it may not be obvious – try subscribing to the website using Google Reader or iGoogle – both will try to find the feed for you.

(photo by cogdogblog @ Flickr CC)

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