How to Promote Your Club, Cause, Church or Business by Blogging

Did you know you can promote your club, cause, church, council, event or business by blogging?

In a previous article on How to Start a Business Blog, I discussed 11 how-to tips which people felt were pretty helpful. But on my How to Blog webinar yesterday, we covered more tips you also deserve to know! For instance:

Blogging isn’t just for business anymore! It’s now being used by pastors, book clubs, trade association groups hoping to influence the public, people who want to promote a cause, etc. Consider it as THE best source of putting your message into the public forum. As long as your purpose is clear (see next paragraph), you can even use blogging to promote yourself as a subject matter expert to attract a new employer. If job seekers are smart, they’ll start a blog to promote their knowledge, skills and experience with something other than a two-page resume! (More tips for job seekers can be found at ColoradoCareerCoach.com) Here are reasons why those groups might want to build a blog:

• ministers who do weddings might want to offer tips to couples considering marriage
• someone starting a membership club would want to attract new members and keep existing members informed
• anyone who teaches classes could provide lesson plans to students via their blog
• non-profits could keep donors up to date with articles and statistics on medical advances, etc. via their blog
• book clubs could do book reviews and include author audio interviews on their blog

And the neat thing is – you can have your blog up and running with your own private domain and hosted for one year for less than $100 bucks a year! Yep, it’s true! Kiss the concept of needing an expensive website goodbye!

Avoid blogging until you’ve developed your social media strategy. People spend a ton of time fiddling around with cool new technologies and then discover they haven’t really thought it through. They didn’t consider how the blog works within their business or marketing plan. There should be specific reasons why you want to blog, or jump into Twitter, Facebook, etc. not just because everyone else is doing it. (Just like our momma’s told us!) Build your blog around your strategy. It will drive the selection of your domain name (URL), main keyword phrases, subject lines for your posts, etc.

Consider the distribution channel you want to use to pump out your content. Now, most folks will figure out how to pull in your content via their own feedreader since AOL, Yahoo, Google and other browsers come with a feedreader already built in. But the majority of us aren’t real clear about feedreaders and still prefer to get articles sent to them via email. PLUS, you’ll want to build your list! So consider a content management system that also allows you to build your prospect list and send them goodies every now and then – bonus articles, audio downloads, etc. Here are some good ones: Aweber.com, Feedblitz.com, 1Shoppingcart.com – some are more complicated than others, but each are priced about the same – about $29.95 for up to 2500 names on your list.

Accept the fact that if you build a blog, you should blog! Or at least, someone you trust, anyway. Yes, there are folks out there who pull in content from article directories and other industry sites set up for that specific purpose. And then you know what happens when you populate your blog with articles everyone else is using? Readers get bored. They’ve seen it all before. They never get a clear sense of who YOU are and what you stand for! You can’t be bold or innovative through someone else’s content. The Internet is chock full of content with more coming our way every day so people have become more discriminating. They want something different and helpful because their time is valuable. Avoid throwing up content that wastes their time just to fill a “page”.

Consider creating a downloadable report or ebook to thank folks who sign up for your blog. As we speak, I’m working on one report for each of my four blogs (yes, I know, but I really DO have a life!) It’s not a bribe – it’s a thank you. It’s also a way to create some viral marketing for yourself or organization. People tend to pass those things around and if you’ve included live links back to your blog or website, your name and phone number, twitter, facebook or linkedin pages, your information will end up in the hands of many people. I’ve discovered a good service for distributing ebooks and downloadable reports and I get no compensation for referring them – check out Ejunkie.com, okay? I tested them on my 48 Ways to Deal with Difficult People ebook last night and for $5 month, they will let me upload 500MB of data. With limited graphics in your ebook or report, that should be plenty!

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m really sold on this technology, and you’d be right! In 2006 I started my first blog and quickly discovered it was the best darned marketing tool ever. Well, at least until something else comes along! The technology isn’t too hard to learn, people love the format, it pulls you up to the top of the search engines if you publish often and set it up properly. About a year ago, I figured out that people gravitate towards blogs that fulfill a niche or focus on just one audience or topic, so I started up three more blogs. Each one targets a different audience, although some readers are on all four of my blogs. (They just can’t get enough of me, I guess! haha!)

So, if you’re going to do this, my final tip for this post would be: get real clear about who your audience/readers are, what you want them to do, think and feel and then make a list of all the topics they’d be interested in reading about. Sit down and come up with a list of 100 article titles; it won’t take you long once you get going. THEN, head on down to the grocery store or bookstore and look at the magazine rack. Notice the way the headlines are written on the covers. Yep, even the National Enquirer with the two-headed, 200 lb. baby! Then log onto some online newspapers and news sites and notice how they write their headlines. It’s usually the “Top 10 Reasons Why…” or the “6 Steps to Doing X”, “How to Do X With Your Eyes Closed”, and my all time favorite, “21 Sinful Secrets of X”.

That’s it for today folks! I’m heading up to Estes Park to watch elk and soak in a hot tub and after all this blogging, dontcha think I deserve it?

Laura, writing from my little cabin in the woods at 7200 ft. above sea level

Tagged as: blogging tips, marketing tips, social media tips