Corporate Blogging For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Marketing and Promoting Your Blog

In This Chapter

• Syndicating content with RSS

• Interacting with the blogosphere

• Integrating with social media

• Social bookmarking

• Repurposing blog content in newsletters

If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you write a blog post and there's no one there to read it, is it helping your company? No, unfortunately not.

Simply put, if you want to accelerate the growth of your blog beyond search and word of mouth, you must promote the blog, its content, and its value beyond your blogging platform.

Blogging platforms were developed with promotion in mind, though! For example, blogging platforms have feeds that are readable by other applications and tools using Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Syndication makes it possible to publish your blog post, but also integrate and extend the content through dozens of other distribution channels.

This is important. The prospects who might be interested in your content may never make an effort to visit your blog. However, they may be participating in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks. By syndicating your content into those networks, it allows you to bring your relevant message to them — where they want to see it!

This chapter discusses RSS syndication and a few other means of getting your blog noticed.

Using RSS to Syndicate Content

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a standard format for publishing content within an eXtensible Markup Language ...