Posts Tagged ‘promote your blog’

Drive Traffic to Your Blog with Blog Carnivals

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

If you use blogging to promote your business then you’re always looking for new ways to drive quality traffic to your blog. When you check your Google Analytics each morning you always want to see that monthly traffic total increasing. One great way to increase traffic to your small business blog is to use Blog Carnivals. In this post we are going to explain what a Blog Carnival is, how businesses can use Blog Carnivals for Inbound Marketing, selecting the right Blog Carnivals for your small business, and how to submit blog articles to Blog Carnivals.

What is a Blog Carnival?

Blog Carnivals are online publications on a specific topic whereby bloggers can submit their articles to the Blog Carnival moderator for inclusion in a future edition of the Carnival. The definition that Wikipedia gives Blog Carnivals is, “A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks to other blog articles on the particular topic.”

Inbound Marketing through Blog Carnivals

As a business owner who publishes blog articles you can find relevant Blog Carnivals (the ones that you think your target audience read) and submit your blog articles to the Blog Carnival. This will get your content in front of the right people. On all Blog Carnivals a link to your blog article accompanies a brief description of the article. The description that you write should be used to convey the value proposition of the article:

quickly explain what the post is about and why the readers of the Blog Carnival should click the link to read your post.

Blog Carnivals are amazing Inbound Marketing tools as they publish links to your blog articles and your target audience is driven from the Blog Carnival to your blog/website. That’s pretty powerful stuff. Not only that, but
Search Engines like Google & Bing will rank your site higher the more Inbound Links you have spread throughout the web.

Here’s an example of a Blog Carnival that’s featuring a Catalyst blog article:

Inbound Marketing through Blog Carnivals

What Blog Carnivals are right for my business?

The first thing you need to do when searching for relevant Blog Carnivals is to find a Blog Carnival directory like BlogCarnival.com. Once you find a solid directory you can then start to search the available Blog Carnival topics. Find a few topics that are relevant to your business, which will therefore be filled with readers who can be classified as your target audience. If you’re a restaurant then find cooking or dining out Blog Carnivals. If you own a pet store then find Blog Carnivals about Pets or more granular topics like Pet supplies. The key is selecting the topics that will be of interest to your target audience. Once you find the topics then you can dig into ALL of the Blog Carnivals for each topic. Many times there will be more than one Carnival for each topic you choose. Within each Topic we usually like to find all of the Blog Carnivals that will be issuing a new Carnival within a week or so. All that’s left after you find all of the Blog Carnivals that you’d like to submit your article to is actually submitting the article!

How do I submit a blog article to BlogCarnival.com ?

BlogCarnival.com is a great Blog Carnival directory. They offer numerous topics and every topic is filled with a number of different Blog Carnivals. If you can’t find a Carnival that meets your needs you can always create your own…though that will require significantly more of your time than simply submitting your blog articles to existing Blog Carnivals.

We like to take time twice per month to submit articles to Blog Carnivals. We usually select one article each time and submit each article to numerous Blog Carnivals. When preparing to submit an article be sure to pick one of your latest articles that you feel is the most relevant to your specific goals for this tactic. We then like to create a 2 – 3 sentence description of the article whereby we explain what the article is about and why people should read it. We then simply go out to all of the Blog Carnivals that we will be submitting the article to, paste in the URL of the article into the field that requires it, paste in our description, review everything to ensure it’s correct, and click submit. The image below gives a visual representation of the format that BlogCarnival.com uses. It’s actually a very simple process, but it packs a big punch in terms of increasing quality traffic to your blog/website!

Inbound Marketing through Blog Carnivals

What Blog Carnival directories do you use?

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Posted in Blog Marketing | No Comments »

Tweet Your Blog Articles More than Once!

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Are you tweeting your blog articles more than once on Twitter?? One of the biggest complaints by Twitter users is that they cannot keep up with the amount of content that comes through their Twitter feeds. It’s true, there are a lot of tweets going out these days. If you’re a frequent Twitter user then you know that you miss a lot of tweets on a regular basis. As a business owner this is highly disappointing. One thing that business owners who use Twitter for business can do is tweet their online content multiple times. This post is going to dig into how you can use Twitter more effectively by strategically tweeting your blog articles.

Tweet Morning, Noon, & Night

As we mention above, it’s hard to know when your customers will be most active on Twitter. The best thing to do to ensure that your content gets in front of your target audience is to tweet your content once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and then again that night. If you’re not on Twitter all day then you’ll simply need to take advantage of Twitter scheduling tools.

TweetDeck & HootSuite allow you to schedule your tweets. When you publish a new blog article, produce a new YouTube video, or create any new online content, be sure to head out to Twitter and tweet that article (we use the Article Title + the URL + Hashtags in our tweets). Don’t stop there. Schedule that same tweet to go out both in the afternoon and later that evening. This way you stand the best chance at getting the tweet out to as many of your Twitter followers as possible.

Twitter for businessWith the above being said, be sure to tweet other content in between the times that the same tweet is going out. You don’t want someone coming to your Twitter profile 2 days later and seeing the same tweet posted 3 times. Once you tweet it for the first time, you can go ahead and tweet other content (examples might be your old content, ReTweet others, or even ReTweet content from blogs that you’re subscribed to – as long as the article is relevant to your followers. You can even schedule these tweets if you have to.

Recycle Tweets throughout the Week

Something that we like to do on the Catalyst Marketers Twitter account is to take some time once a week to go back through our tweets for the week and ReTweet any of our recent blog articles. You can do this with all of the online content that you create and then promote through Twitter. By going back through your tweets you can copy old tweets and ReTweet them back into the Twittersphere. This allows you to take existing tweets and get them back in front of followers who may not have seen them the first time. By repeating this process throughout a given month you ensure that your getting your online content in front of as many customers & prospects as possible.

Tweet Archived Blog Posts

Have you taken the time lately to go back through those wicked old blog posts? You know the ones from months and months ago. I’ll bet that they could benefit from a little re-promotion. A great quarterly exercise is to go back through all of your archived blog posts and YouTube videos to see what you can ReTweet on Twitter (among other social tools). By getting archived blog articles back in front of people you can drive increased traffic to your those posts. There are probably new people that you’re following who you were not following back when you first promoted the articles. There are also people who simply didn’t see it the first time.

Google Analytics

By taking time to go back through your archived content, determining what content is still relevant, and then ReTweeting that content, you’re going to start driving those articles back into your Top Content for the month. Top Content is a Google Analytics report that shows what pages are receiving the most traffic at any given time. If you’re getting a certain amount of traffic to your website on a monthly basis and then you start re-promoting existing content, you’re going to drive even more traffic to your site as you’re getting even more content in front of your target audience.

Conclusion

If you follow the steps outlined in this post we have no doubt that you’ll drive more traffic to your online content. Whether you create blog articles, YouTube videos, Flickr Slide Shows, or all three, you can benefit from tweeting them more than once on Twitter. Your followers all keep different schedules. By understanding this you can take advantage of it instead of using it as an excuse for not using Twitter. Knowing that all of your Twitter followers are not on Twitter at once simply means that you have to get creative with your Tweets. By tweeting your online content throughout the day, retweeting it throughout the week, and then tweeting archived content, you will see your site traffic go way up.

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Posted in Twitter Marketing | No Comments »

Create Your Own Connect with Us Cards

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Are you still looking for effective ways to promote your online presence? It’s a good idea to always be looking for new, and creative, ways to drive traffic to your online assets. It’s hard for people to connect with you online when they have no idea that you’re using the Internet to promote your business. Almost every interaction with a customer, or prospect, provides an opportunity to promote your online presence. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare YouTube, a Blog, or any other online social tool, be sure to take the opportunity to drive traffic to your online tools as often as possible. In today’s post, we are going to explain the art of the “Connect with Us” Card – a simple tool that packs a big punch when it comes to driving traffic to your online tools.

The Connect with Us Card is a simple idea that was sparked through an email conversation with a Catalyst client, the local Central Bucks Family YMCA of Doylestown. The Marketing Director at the Y was explaining that a Senior Membership Director was heading out into the local Doylestown community to hand out 2-week membership passes to employees of local Doylestown businesses. During the conversation, we realized that we had missed an opportunity to promote our online presence. We wanted to print our Twitter & Facebook URLs on the 2-week membership passes. From there, the idea of the Connect with Us Card was born. Instead of printing the URLs on the 2-week membership passes, and any other subsequent print materials that we wanted to promote on, the YMCA created the Connect with Us Card.

The concept for the Connect with Us Card is simple. It’s like a business card for the organization’s online presence. On the front of the card is the Central Bucks Family YMCA logo, the logos of each of the online tools that they use to connect, and build relationships with, their members and the surrounding community, as well as, their physical street address. On the back of the card are simply the links to each of their online tools. The card is clean, and to the point, connect with Central Bucks Family YMCA online.

FRONT

Promote my social media sites

BACK

Promote my social media sites

As you can see from the images above, it’s critical that you create custom URLs for each online tool that you use. Having a custom URL that isn’t very long provides you with much flexibility when creating promotional tools like Connect with Us cards. A few months back we wrote about the importance of having a custom Facebook URL for your Facebook business page, and this is a perfect example of why it’s important to have that custom URL. Can you imagine if you wanted to create a Connect with Us Card with that ugly URL string that all Facebook Business pages have before you customize your URL? The card would have to be 6 inches long just to contain the URL.

If you need to shorten your URL for Facebook and don’t have 25 Likes yet, then you can use URL shortening tools like bit.ly, and even customize your URLs. Using URL shorteners may even be the best bet for your Connect with Us Cards, as you can create customize short URLs for each online tool, which you can then track via the Analytics section of bit.ly – Just be sure not to use those same URLs in other tactics, as that will taint your data. If you create customized URLs for only the Connect with Us Card, you’ll be able to tell how much traffic the cards are driving to each of your online tools, simply by checking the Clicks for each link.

Connect with Us cards can be given out at events, during trade shows, with receipts at your store, with deliveries, etc. If you have been trying to answer the question, how do I promote my online tools, then Connect with Us Cards are a great answer to your question. Have you been using something similar? How has it been working for you?

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Posted in Inbound Marketing | No Comments »

Promote Your Small Business Blog through Google Places

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Are you looking for ways to drive more traffic to your small business blog? Taking advantage of Google Places ‘Post to your place page’ functionality is a great way to do so. Google Places is a free online tool that allows business owners to list their business on Google Maps. At the same time, if you create a local business listing on Google, your business can start ranking in local search. The are many great benefits to having your business listed on Google Places, as well as, other local search tools. Today we are going to talk about one specific benefit, the ability to drive traffic to your small business blog.

Online Marketing Philadelphia PAOnce you’ve created a Google Places Profile for your small business, you can then begin using your profile as a way to drive traffic to your blog. First, navigate to your Google Places listing, click “Owner-verified listing” to get to your profile. Once you’re on your Google Places profile, on the right-hand side, there is a text box for you to “post to your place page”. The post to your place page area is the area that you can use to promote a new blog post.

Social Media Philadelphia PAWhen promoting your blog on Google Places, simply copy/paste the article title into the text box and then copy/paste the article link into the text box. One nice thing about Posting content to your Google Places Page is that Google Places allows you to input 160 characters — 20 more than Twitter. The extra 20 characters allows you to add the article link in full. By not using a URL shortener, you are adding to your inbound links, which is the single biggest factor in ranking you higher in search.

If you still have a few extra characters, you can ask people for a certain response, request they leave a comment on the blog, provide your thoughts on the article, or add a description to the article. Whatever you decide to do, definitely use those extra 20 characters to your advantage when promoting your new blog post on Google Places.

Once you’ve written your post and added your link, simply click ‘post’ to display your blog promotion on you Google Places Business listing. Now, when someone finds your Google Places Business Listing, they will see your post. If the post is relevant to them, they will click the link to read your blog.

Check out how your “Post to your place page” post looks like — follow the arrow within the image below to see what the Catalyst Marketers Google Places listing looks like.

Social Media Marketing Doylestown PA

Google Places is a great way to get qualified traffic to your small business blog, as first the person had to perform an online search using relevant terms for your small business. To make sure your Google Places listing ranks for relevant searches, you should use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find relevant keywords to fill your Google Places Business Listing with. Optimizing your Google Places Business Listing for Search Engines is critical in driving quality traffic to your local business listing.

By optimizing your Google Places listing for search, you now know that most of the traffic that arrives to your listing is quality traffic. You can further qualify them if they then click on your link to your business blog. If that happens, that means the individual has now taken two actions to get to your blog. With that being said, my guess is that he/she will stay on your site for a while, as well as, click around on a few different pages within your site. This is exactly the kind of traffic you want on your business blog. Now get out there and start using your Google Places listing to promote your new blog articles.

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Posted in Online Marketing, Small Business | 5 Comments »

Promote Your Small Business Blog with the ShareThis Plugin

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Do you blog about your small business? If not, you really should consider it. If writing isn’t your thing, then you can always hire an e-marketing agency to blog for you, but either way, getting content out there is the best way to position your business as a thought-leader in your industry, as well as, educate your customers on your business/business philosophies.

In an earlier post, I wrote about how small business owners can start blogging. There are some very easy steps to follow and best of all, it can cost you $0 to get started. Compare that to what you spent last month on that radio promotion that attracted exactly 0 new customers into your business. Once you have a blog, you need to get it out into the social sphere, which is what this post is about.

Last week I wrote about adding the ReTweet button to your small business blog, so that others can promote your content for you. Well, not only should you have the ReTweet button on your blog (since only Twitter users can help you with that), but you should add the ShareThis plugin to your small business blog.

ShareThis is a free plugin that you can download and add to your blog. Download it here. Before you download it, you can customize certain aspects of it. You can have a rotating icon OR change the button text. There are a few different things you can customize. ShareThis is a super tool for helping others help you promote your small business blog.

ShareThis offers users numerous different social networks to use for promoting your blog. Why is this beneficial? Well, if one of your readers uses Reddit a lot and she wants to promote your post, then she can hover over the ShareThis plugin, click Reddit, and promote your post there. It’s the same for someone who uses Digg or LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter what social networks a reader uses, ShareThis provides all of them.

As you can see on the Catalyst Marketers blog, we emrebedded our ShareThis plugin at the bottom of every post. Once somoene is finished reading an entry, he or she can go down to the plugin and promote our post. Do you see the power of having others promote your stuff for you? Now all you have to focus on is writing great content so that people will feel the need to share it.

With that said, hopefully you found this post informative. If you did, please hover over the ShareThis plugin and promote this post to all of your friends ;) – Thanks!

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Posted in Blog Marketing | No Comments »

Promote Your Social Media in Print Ads

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

If you’re looking for ways to drive traffic to your social media tools, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, then consider using your traditional advertising tactics, like print ads, radio, and TV, to inform your customers about your presence on certain social media tools. The image below was captured from the local Clipper Magazine circulated in the Lansdale, PA area. It shows how a small business is using their print advertisements to promote their Tranquility LIFE Spa & Hair Design Facebook fan page.

Eventually, Tranquility won’t have to pay for those expensive print advertisements because they will have already built a strong following on their Facebook fan page. Those coupons you see in the ad can very well be placed on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a great Twitter Coupon application that’s free to use. Eventually free social media tools, like Facebook, will completely eliminate the need for small business owners to pay for expensive ads, like this print ad. Hopefully those reduced costs will increase profits for business owners, while at the same time, reduce costs for customers. This is one way social media is changing the game of marketing small businesses.

Social Media Promotion Tips for Small Business Owners

  • Use existing advertising channels to promote your social media tools
  • Use in-store promotions
  • Post feedback on industry blogs & include links to your social media sites
  • Use your business cards to promote social media

It’s really great to see Tranquility LIFE Spa promoting their Facebook fan page in their print ads. If you’re going to incur the expense of print advertising, then you mine as well get as much value out of it as possible. Use this example to think about the different ways you’re currently promoting your products and services and figure out how you can integrate your social media messaging into those existing ads. If you’re getting ready to buy any traditional advertising, then definitely be sure to include information about your social media sites in those ads. I know I just became a fan of Tranquility’s Facebook fan page and I’m sure many others have as well.

How are you promoting your social media tools through your traditional advertising campaigns? What have the results been like?

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Posted in Online Marketing | 3 Comments »

Socialize Your Business Cards

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Social tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Squidoo, and the list goes on, are providing small businesses a way to communicate with customers, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales. These online tools are also a great way to drive traffic to your website, your blog, a microsite, or even a promo page. But before you can drive traffic from your social tools to your website, you must first drive traffic to your social tools.

I was at a networking event in Philadelphia, PA the other day and when I was explaining the power of social tools to a prospect of Catalyst Marketers, she asked, “how do I drive traffic to my Facebook page or my LinkedIn profile?”. It’s a legitimate question. My response, “there are a number of ways to gain followers of your social tools; creating an e-marketing strategy is a good place to start”.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your social tools is through your business card. Everyone loves to give and receive business cards. Even with all of the great new technologies out there, business cards are still very popular in today’s business environment. With that said, if your business card still only has your business phone number, fax number & email address, then you’re not making it work hard enough for you. Use your business card to drive traffic to your social tools. Then use those tools as a way to build trust with your audience and educate them on the benefits of your product or service. Ultimately drive them from your social tools to your e-commerce website or to your store.

Here’s an example of my business card for Catalyst Marketers:
Click to email Ryan Taft

What are some other ways you like to drive traffic to your social tools?

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Posted in Online Marketing | 10 Comments »