If you don't put out your open house signs... Would anyone show up? The same goes for your Blog!

I started writing our blog about 2 years ago. In the beginning, I viewed our blog as it's own separate entity and did very little to cross promote it with our other marketing efforts.

I think a lot of that had to do with my confidence level and I felt I had not quite found my voice. It can be intimidating to start blogging. Every post that I wrote and every comment I received made me realized I did have something to contribute to the community. At some point... the training wheels popped off and I was off to become a full blown blogger!

The beginning of this year I realized I had this huge library of content that could be leveraged in our other marketing efforts. Our blog was no longer about the points I could collect or about the Internet ranking I could achieve. It is about a valuable resource of articles (and rants) that I could LEVERAGE to get more clients.

Looking back... How could I miss the biggest pot of gold in my possession?

We produce an e-newsletter that is sent out to our database. I don't know what I was thinking, but I would write a brand new featured article for each e-newsletter. At some point I realized... duh... Why am I recreating the wheel here? Why not use something I had already listed as a blog post?

At first, I would copy and paste the blog post right into the e-newsletter. This worked fine, but I quickly realized that I could kick it up a notch by adding a teaser paragraph instead of the entire article. This way it would force our readers to click through to our bog to get the rest of the information.

This did 2 things...

First it allowed me to track within Constantcontact.com (the website we use to send our e-newsletters) which articles were of interest to our database. You see, if you just copy the entire article into the e-newsletter, you have no idea if they read that particular article or not. Constantcontact.com will tell you they opened the email, but I had no way to identify which articles were the most popular. If you add a teaser paragraph and a link to the rest of the article, Constantcontact.com will track every time a reader clicks on each link. Now all of a sudden I knew how many people read our articles and who specifically clicked a particular link!

The added bonus for restructuring our e-newsletter?... Every time a reader would click a the link, it would drive more traffic to our blog site. Think about it... One of the ways Google rates your blog is based on the number of visitors it gets. This is a great proactive model you can use to push more traffic to your blog!

I have recently changed this featured e-newsletter article into a promo piece for our blog. I list 4 or 5 blog posts with links to each! My goal is to get people trained to go to our blog to get the information directly. I encourage folks to sign up to receive these posts via email on this promo piece. 

I also create e-newsletters with other referral partners who work with the same target market. I use this same model and offer content that benefits their database. This creates even more traffic to our blog and that original blog content is being send to hundreds of people! In the past I would write that same post and it would sit there waiting for someone to drop in and read it.

If you have not figured it out yet... this model can be used in many different ways. I have added my blog posts to Twitter and Facebook and have seen huge jumps in my blog stats.

For Facebook, I have created several groups and fan pages that allow me to attract my target prospective clients. This way I can offer links to each group that is of interest to that particular niche market. 

See... It is kinda like sitting an open house and not putting out the signs. Is the house great...yes! Are you good at what you do?... YES! But if you don't put out the open house signs... there is no way folks would know that you are in there waiting for them! In order to have a successful open house, you need to have a sign at every corner, send out an email to your database, and list it online and in the paper so that people actually show up!

The same thing goes for your blog. If you write the best post out there and it just sits.. how is that doing you any good? But if you post it on social networking websites and send it out to hundreds of people via your database (and other people's database)... now you have got yourself some action!

Did this post make you think differently about your blog? Leave a comment... I would love to hear from you!

Erin