A successful blog finds the right topics to talk about and whips up public interest in a way that makes it exciting for everyone who participates. How can you do all this in the little time that you have? Automation is the answer.
Creating your blog
Knowing what to blog about is half the battle won. Marketing your blog becomes far easier when you have material that answers the very questions that your audience is asking. It can take a good bit of time, though, to sift through tons of information on the social networks to find out exactly what’s being asked or talked about. What you need are tools that can help you generate content ideas for your blog that guarantee immediate interest.
- InboxQ – This tool comes up with its ideas by sifting through Twitter. All you need to do is to set up this tool with keywords for the general subjects that you like to cover. When someone on Twitter asks a question that seems relevant to your keywords, InboxQ makes sure you hear about it. Knowing the right question to on your blog can be a godsend to the busy blogger.
- Content Idea Generator – This is a tool that looks farther than Twitter. It scans Reddit, Facebook, Google News and also Twitter to look for any kind of story that seems relevant to your area of specialization. You don’t just need to use this tool for blogs, though. You can use it for ideas for any kind of content.
Marketing your blog
Disqus is about the most powerful blog marketing tool in existence today. This is a discussion and commenting service that websites can have installed. Once a website or blog has Disqus installed, it transforms the tired old simple commenting system that everyone is familiar with into something far more powerful.
Let’s say that one needs to market how Internet Service Providers customers get higher speeds than on any other service. Every time a customer or visitor comes up with a comment, his name can be clicked on for a full view of his commenting history.
Disqus tries to promote the commenter as an important player – on par with the bloggers or the writers. Not only does this make the commenters feel valued, it gives every other visitor a better view of the story as this commenter sees it. The net result of a Disqus commenting system on a blog is that it makes the blog feel like a real community.
Digg Digg is a tool that helps you install just about any social sharing button on your blog that you would need for quick word of mouth. If you didn’t have a tool such as a Digg Digg, you would need to download a plug-in from every social network. Once you use Digg Digg to install all the buttons that you need, you can get them to display anywhere on your page and in any orientation that you want. It can give your humble blog a professional look and great word-of-mouth.
Optin Skin is software that lets you add little special notes to the bottom of each blog and then ask for an email opt-in. It’s a great way to automate the marketing of your blog. Optin Skin is especially effective because it places the opt-in message not on the frequently missed sidebar but at the bottom of each post. It has another piece of psychological wizardry up its sleeve – it shows potential sign-ups how many other people have signed up in the past. Considering how marketing psychologists tell us that peer pressure is the best way to get people to make a move, this is very effective.
About guest blogger
This guest post is by Ed Olson
Ed Olson is a marketing consultant. He loves to share his tips for better marketing on small business blogs.