EDU SERIES – Blogs: Part 4 of 4 – Promote Business

In this article we will continue our series by talking about how you can promote business for your company.

Step 11: Promote Your Article

To make the most of this method, let’s assume you have no following on social media whatsoever.

But, the biggest factor for how highly your article ranks in Google is how many people link to it and read it. Which means that if you want the SEO juice to start flowing, you need to get more people reading it, and more people linking to it.

With that in mind, here’s what I would do to promote articles:

1. Email Your List

I know you haven’t built a list yet, but secretly, you already have one.

It’s all your friends. Shoot everyone you’re remotely connected to an email saying:

“Hey [NAME],

I started this new site/business where I talk about (your offering).

Let me know if you’re interested in it and I’ll send you an article every now and then

Anyone who says yes, add them to your list.

“But I don’t want to bug my friends”. Get over it. You don’t lose anything by asking, you’ll get the initial bump you need, and you’d be surprised by how many will be interested.

2. Post to Social

I assume you have some Facebook friends.

A great way to promote business is to post the article to Facebook, tag some people you think would be interested, and see what happens. You’d be surprised by how many of your friends might be interested in what you have to say.

The same goes for Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other network you frequent.

3. Growth Hack Reddit

When you promote business, it’s worth bearing in mind that the great thing about a spike on Reddit is that it sent such a strong signal to Google of my site’s authority that my daily number of organic visitors doubled the next day, and only went up from there.

The basic steps are:

  1. Find a few subreddits that allow “link” posts
  2. Post your link there
  3. Ask a few friends to give you initial upvotes

There are finer points, like timing your posts, adding comments, and picking subreddits with a low volume to subscriber ratio, but this is enough of an outline to get you started.

Two warnings though:

  1. (Some) people on Reddit will hurt your feelings. Even when you’re doing well.
  2. Reddit is unreliable. I’ve had posts get < 100 visits from Reddit, even when I thought they’d do amazingly well. You can’t rely on it, but when it works, it WORKS.
  3. Email Everyone You Mentioned

Remember the list of other blogs you mentioned in your post? Now’s the time to cash in on those plugs.

Make a list of everyone you mentioned (and LINKED TO), find their email addresses, and shoot them a quick email.

The fastest way is to just put all their names and email addresses into a spreadsheet and load them into your email software to quickly email everyone.

Just say “hey I mentioned and linked to you in this post, here’s the link, have a good day.”

Don’t make it a big ask. I get these kinds of emails when people mention us, and it’s annoying when someone says “can you please Tweet it, share it on Facebook, and submit it to GrowthHackers and Inbound?”

Errrr… No, I’m busy.

Outreach like this does two things: It (hopefully) gets them to share it, and it puts you on their radar so that when they’re writing posts in the future, they link to you, too. This is one of the best things you can do to get initial links.

The bigger their audience, the more helpful this can be from a traffic standpoint too. There was one case where a popular blogger shared one of my articles to her almost 700,000 Facebook followers. That was a very good day.

4. Submit to Other Relevant Communities

I’m not a big fan of spending time in online communities to promote business, but if there’s a good one that you can submit your links to and not worry too much about engaging with then go for it.

For marketing related posts I’ll always submit it to Inbound and Growthhackers, but it’s hard to find link-sharing message boards like those for other niches.

5. Submit to Quuu

If you join the site Quuu, you can submit links to different categories that are then shared by other Quuu users trying to fill their social media feeds.

I find that adding my articles there gets them another 50-100 shares on Twitter, sometimes way more, and is a quick and easy traffic boost.

Pro tip: Include hashtags for more reach.

Step 10: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Remember that initial email list we managed to put together? Now’s the time to share to all of them each time you post. The more email addresses you have, the more people you have to promote your new articles too. Which results in more traffic, and more traffic results in higher Google rankings.

Make an email and package up a group of articles that are related and have people sign up to receive accordingly gives you an easy benefit to offer your visitors.

The easiest way to do this is just wait till you have  around 5 great articles on your site under a certain theme, then package them into an autoresponder in MailChimp or another email marketing tool, and tell your visitors that they can “Sign up to get 5 free lessons on …..” or something similar.

We’ve been in the Sales and Marketing Strategy game for longer than we care to remember, but we pride ourselves on the combined exposure our team has had to different B2B markets globally, and the strategic services we offer your business as a result.

If you are looking for Salesforce / Pardot Support with an existing Org or want to know if Salesforce or Pardot is right for you, get in touch with us for a free consultation or simply a chat. We work alongside Start-ups and Enterprises alike, we’re certain we will find you a path to growth, whatever your plans.

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