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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Small Business Owners: Marketing Your Company Blog

Have you started your companies' blog yet? Well if you have there are tons of new tools out there to help you market it and to get it seen by your target audience. Today we are going to go through 6 helpful tips to help you get your message out there and on Friday we'll tackle another 6 tips to complete the series.

1. Create a ping list.

A ping list is basically a list of URLs that you set up on any blogging software that "pings" the major rss aggregators every time you post a new blog. It is extremely helpful in giving your blog visibility. Most blog platforms have a setting where you can place a ping list. Need an example of some URL's you should use for your ping list - here's some of the one's I use:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

This doesn't even scratch the tip of the iceberg on the number of ping URLs available.

2. Syndicate your blog posts.

Many blog resources and directories will syndicate every post url or at least a snippet of your post. The two that I rely upon are Bloglines & Technorati. However there are a few others out there:

- Blogcatalog.com
- Google Blog Search
- FeedFury.com
- NewsIsFree.com
- Syndic8.com

3. Make sure you give your readers the tools they need to bookmark your blog to social media sites.

Ever seen this icon on a blog or a news article?


Of course you have! You want to be sure to include this icon on your blog so that your readers can bookmark all of your posts. If you want to incorporate this button on your page, try the one from Addthis.com

4. Make your RSS feeds available to your readers.
Nothing is worse than finding an interesting blog & there is no RSS feed button available. This is how readers are able to subscribe to your blog and it is a great way to ensure that they keep coming back for more.

Typically, the rss feed is shown with the following image:
Make sure to include one of these icons on every page of your blog.

5. Sign-up for a Feedburner account.
If you are interested in knowing who came to your blog, how long they stayed, and a number of other important metrics, a Feedburner account is crucial. Feedburner allows you to change your feed, so you can keep statistics on your subscribers.

6. Submit your blog to the major blog directories
This is a very important step b/c readers looking for blogs on your chosen topic go here to find blogs of interest. Listing you blog on the directory will only help to increase your blog's visibility.

I hope your head has stopped spinning by now. If you have any questions about it in the mean time or want to discuss what I've written here, please leave a comment and let's discuss it. Til next time.....


Yours truly,

B.Croom
Social Media Stepchild

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