How to get more exposure for your blogs

Here is a quick six step guide on how to get more exposure for your blogs.

1. Use keywords within your blog
I recommend that you work with a list of keywords when you blog. Ensure that you include your keywords within your blog entries (e.g. ‘how to get more exposure for your blogs’) and with the Tags which are associated with your blogs (i.e. within WordPress, you can enter Tags in a field on the right hand side of the screen).

2. Write SEO friendly blog headlines
Your blog headlines are important. Ideally, they need to comprise a set of words which are likely to be put into a search engine, i.e. ‘How to go viral on YouTube’ (which I have used as a blog title within www.nigeltemple.com – at the time of writing, this is doing quite well within Google).

Ideally, your blog software should automatically wrap your blog headline within ‘H’ tags (which means that Google will read your headlines and factor this into your search rankings).

3. Categorise and tag your blog entries
Blogging software, such as WordPress, allows you to ‘categorise’ your blog entries. I think of categories as ‘shoe boxes’. For example, within www.nigeltemple.com I currently have the following categories: Branding, Business, Creative thinking, Internet marketing, marketing strategy, Nigel Temple, Promotional techniques, Public speaking, Selling, Social media, Success, The Marketing Compass, Videos, Writing.

I also have sub categories, such as ‘Logo’, which fits beneath Branding. Within my blog, one of the ways in which visitors can find what they are looking for is by clicking on a category (such as Branding) and they will then find all of the blog entries within this category.

In addition to categories, use ‘Tags’ to associated specific keywords with particular blogs. This gives your readers another way of finding information which is relevant to them.

4. Shorten your blog URLs
URL = web page address. Google indexes URLs. When you use Google, you are searching through an enormous database of URLs.

The challenge with blog URLs is that they can be quite long, i.e.
https://www.marketingcompass.co.uk/2012/06/27/how-plan-successful-business-seminars

The answer is to shorten them, by using a service such as http://bitly.com/ or http://goo.gl
which is run by Google and integrates with your Google account. Having shortened your blog URL, you can drop it into Twitter, for example.

5. Use social media to promote your blog
Include social media bookmarking / sharing icons within your blog entries, so that your readers can share what they have read with their followers.

Having written a blog, you should promote it via the social media. You will find that if you include a shortened URL (see above), that social media platforms such as Google+ and Facebook automatically pick up information and an image (if you have one) from within your blog. Use hashtags (i.e. #marketing) within Twitter (and other social media platforms which accept them), to make it easier for people to find your content.

6. Promote your blog within your newsletter
A good way of doing this is to include a ‘teaser paragraph’ or two, within your newsletter with a link to your blog entry.

As always – any questions – just ask.