In part 1 of Marketing Your Blog we considered in brief a summary of the most effective ways to market your blog.  In Part 2, we?ll look at some of these ways in more detail, and give you ideas about how you can implement them.  Your blog will then be on its way to being an effective marketing tool for you!

1. Keyword research & optimisation

Ensuring your blog is informative, accurate and interesting is crucial, as is using keywords within the blog to improve your website?s SEO.  Do some keyword research by picking out some of the main topics covered in your post and putting them into Google Adwords – a free keyword suggestion tool.  This will give you those words that people are actually using to search internet.  You can then use these related words to ensure your blog contains SEO-useful words.

2. RSS Feeds 

One of the most powerful and misunderstood mechanisms of a blog is its RSS feed. This really simple syndication method allows you to automatically feed your blog?s content to many different places, including many social networking sites.  The great thing here is that once you have established RSS connections on your social sites, you shouldn?t have to do it again.

3. Shorten your post?s URL

This step used to only apply to posting links on Twitter, but with the addition of analytics (click-through tracking) on many of the URL shortening services, posting a shortened URL on any of your social sites is a smart strategy.  There are a few URL shorteners you can use: Bit.ly, Ow.ly, Cli.gs all of which give you click stats and referring data for the link.

4. Social Media – Status updates

Use your blog as a reason to update your status on all social media sites you subscribe to – the most common for business being LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  Make sure you use your shortened link (so you can analyse click throughs) and a teaser line to encourage people to open the link.  If you want to get your message out effectively, tailor the language in your teaser line accordingly.  Your message (teaser line) should sound right in the context in which it is presented.  LinkedIn is more business-like than Facebook and Twitter, and so your relationships with your users will be different on each platform too.  You also need to send these updates several times after each new post in order to reach as many other users as possible.

5. Social media content promotion

Most social networking sites and online forums allow content promotion as long as it?s valuable, relevant to the community, and not blatant self promotion.  Use a question in your teaser line related to your blog content, followed by your shortened link to the blog.  You can then start ?conversations? with other users who answer your questions.

6. Seek out and comment on other blogs with similar topics 

Providing helpful, valuable comments on other blogs can be a great way to generate traffic, develop relationships, build a following and add backlinks. If you?ve just finished a blog post on a topic, now is the perfect time to do a quick search to find other blog posts on the same topic.