How to Get the Most Marketing Power From Your Blog Posts

There are lots of reasons to keep a blog as a marketing tool. Not the least of which is helping you rank higher in the search engines (that’s a whole ‘nother article.) But I often hear dancers complaining that they just don’t have time to add blogging to their marketing mix. Well, what if your blog could do more than just sit there? What if it actively brought new prospects to your website and got them interested in possibly taking a class or hiring you for a party?

Would that get you to write?

Here’s how to take a short, humble blog post and turn it into a marketing superhero in no time flat.

1) Post a link on Facebook:

Businesses should post content on their Facebook pages about three times a week. When you blog once a week, you’ve got 1/3 of your content done. All you have to do is write a quick description of the article in your status bar and then copy/paste the link to the post. Your Facebook fans will see the link in their feed, and if they’re interested enough, they’ll click through and read the whole thing.

You’ll get more click-throughs if you include a photo of some kind in your post. And you’ll also improve interaction if you ask people to comment. (There’s even a comment plugin for WordPress that combines your blog comments and Facebook comments into one stream.)

2) Post a link on Twitter:

Experts recommend you post new content on Twitter about once a day. The same idea applies here. Post a short description and link to your blog post so your Twitter followers will see it, too.  Make sure you keep your description under 120 characters so your followers can retweet the link easily.

Easy-peasy shortcut:

If you want to make your Facebook and Twitter posting faster and easier, check out HootSuite. It’s a social media dashboard that lets you schedule your posts out in advance. You can also organize your feeds, mentions and run special keyword searches.

If you use lots of smaller social media platforms like Tumblr, Google Buzz and others, you may want to set up a Ping.FM account so you can post links back to your blog on all your platforms with one click.

3) Post it in your email newsletter

Okay, so you know you need to send an email newsletter to your mailing list. But how often do you actually get around to doing it? Most dancers only send email when they’re promoting something–a new class, a workshop, etc. But that means your open rates decline quickly because your list expects only sales messages from you.

When you post a link to your blog in a super-short email, you’re showing your list that you have more to talk to them about than just selling them something. They’ll be much more likely to open all your messages if you give them interesting blog posts on a regular basis.

Don’t overdo this. Once a week is plenty. If you get a lot of unsubscribes, perhaps once or twice a month is a better rate for you. It all depends on your audience and what you’re talking about.

Easy-peasy shortcut:

Yes, there’s an automated tool for sending your blog to your email list. Sweet! It’s called RSS to email and most email providers have this service. Once you set it up, the service will automatically send any new blog posts to your email list. You can also set it up to get your permission first (just in case your whole list doesn’t need to see every single post.)

MailChimp is one of the most popular email newsletter services because it’s free and reliable. Here’s a tutorial on how to set up RSS to email on MailChimp.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/rss-to-email-tutorial/

Hardcore marketing ideas:

So, you want to really squeeeezze every last drop of marketing power from your blog posts? Well, depending on what your post is about, you can try one of these techniques:

• Make a powerpoint video and put on YouTube and SlideShare.
• Change the wording a bit, add a news angle and post a free press release for backlink credit.
• Rewrite it a tad and send it to your local media as a press release.
• Send it as a submission to a local arts blog.

There you have it. One blog post, lots of marketing channels covered. What are you waiting for? Go write something.

What’s your favorite/most effective blog post on your site? We’d love to see it. Post a link to it in the comments.