There is no denying that a blog is a highly effective tool for successfully promoting yourself. While once used by everyday people to share their thoughts and opinions, a blog has now become one of the most powerful marketing tools an author or speaker can use.

Photo Credit: Sean MacEntee

Whether you have set up a blog as the foundation of your speaking or writing career or you are using a blog to promote your books, one thing is certain: You want to attract as much attention as possible. While that blog may be expertly designed, highly informative, and very engaging, if you aren’t effective promoting it, you won’t be driving as much traffic to it as you could.

What’s that? Promote a blog? But isn’t the purpose of a blog to promote your books and events? While yes, this is true, in order to effectively use your blog to get the word out about your career, you have to get the word out about your blog.

Promoting a Blog

There are a number of ways you can drive more attention to your blog: social media networks, press releases, link building, social bookmarking, guest posting, email marketing and syndication.

However, while these methods may be effective, you might not be ready to handle them on your own. Perhaps you are just starting out and don’t know the first thing about blog promotion, or maybe you have so many other aspects of your life to attend to that you simply don’t have the time to dedicate to promoting your blog.

Employing the services of a company or a person who specializes in blog promotion is certainly a viable option. But how much should you set aside in your marketing budget to employ these blog promotion services? Let’s take a look:

Prioritize:

Determine how much you depend on your blog for driving more customers to your online store or speaking events or for buying your services. Weigh the importance of your blog against the importance of other types of marketing efforts you employ, such as print ads, email marketing, etc. If your blog is high on your marketing priority list, you will want to invest more in it than other promotional tactics, but if it is lower on your list of priorities, you may not want to invest as much.

Consider the Promotional Methods:

Take into consideration the types of promotional methods to be used. What methods will most effectively spread the word? How much will these methods cost? While it may cost more to employ someone to write press releases or social media news releases to promote your blog than it will to have someone write social media posts, the releases may be more effective and, therefore, investing more money in them may be money well spent.

Shop Around:

If you are going to hire someone else to promote your blog, shop around in order to see what types of services are offered and at what rates.

Most of all, do your due diligence. See what they’ve accomplished both for themselves and for their clients. Don’t just take their word for it. Ask if they’ll allow you to speak with their references.

Also, check out the Alexa and Google Page ranks of the blogs they support. These are independent evaluations of the authority and traffic ranks of a site. If they have successfully helped a blog build visibility online, you should see that in the ranking results.

Setting Your Budget:

Once you determine what types of promotional services you want to use and how much you predict these services will boost your success, consider your marketing budget. If you believe blog promotion will drive more traffic to your events and books than email marketing, you may want to devote more of your marketing budget toward it. Remember, when starting out, it is always better to allot more and end up using less than it is to allot less and need more. (Check out this post from Mint.com “Budgeting Tools: Which Ones You Need in Your Toolbox” for some tools that can help you set up a budget. I’m also a huge fan of using YNAB for both personal and business budgets.)

Blogging truly can have a powerful effect on the success of your speaking engagements, the sale of your books, and the success of your service offerings. Promoting your blog could just be the extra oomph you need to reap the benefits that blogging possesses.

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