SEO Final Steps: Content Promotion for Local Blogs

by Matt on Aug 2, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS

(This is the last of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites.)

seo-2You may have a terrific local blog — and I hope you do! — but no matter how good it is, you’re making a mistake if you think that just writing good local content with all the right SEO tactics is automatically going to bring in loads of new visitors. No matter how great your content is, you still have to promote it in other places.

I’m stretching the definition of SEO here, but we’re still talking about increasing readership and that’s the bottom line. Here’s a list of online and offline ways to promote your content.

Online Content Marketing

facebookFacebook
As much as I dislike Facebook, there’s no denying its popularity nor the fact that it could be a great venue for increasing awareness of your hyperlocal blog. Pages are the primary tool that Facebook offers for this kind of thing. If you’re ready to create a page for your local blog, here’s where to start.

Although I’m hardly an expert on Facebook, Cari and I have setup Facebook pages for all four of our local blogs. We post links to our blog articles, have local photo albums, and sections for local event listings and discussions. Our pages are new and we don’t have a ton of activity on any of them right now. But, if you want to see what we’re doing, here are the pages:

Rather than relying on what we’re doing as a guide, you might want to read these excellent articles about Facebook pages and promotion.

twitterTwitter
At some point, Cari and I may follow the same path and create separate Twitter accounts for each blog; but at the moment, I don’t think that’s smart for us. There’s not a ton of local Twitter users in our area, and I don’t think any such account would get many followers. (Our Facebook pages don’t have many “likes” yet, either.) So, for now, I’m posting links to some of our local blog articles via my Twitter account. In a larger city, though, I’d think that you would want to separate your personal Twitter account from your blog’s account.

youtubeYouTube
YouTube is the second-largest search engine on the planet — it gets more searches than Yahoo and Bing. If you’re creating video content — and why wouldn’t you be? — you should be sharing it on YouTube. Three quick suggestions:

1. Setup an account specifically for your blog; don’t use your personal account. People may want to subscribe to your blog videos, but not your personal ones.

2. Be sure to mention your blog name and URL in the descriptions of your videos so people can learn who the source is when they find your videos.

3. Be sure to promote your YouTube channel on your blog, so that any heavy YouTube users know that they can subscribe to your channel and see your videos when they visit YouTube.

flickrFlickr
If you’re taking photos for your blog — and again, why wouldn’t you be? — Flickr is a great place to upload and share them. Again, you’ll need to decide if you want to use a personal Flickr account or create one specifically for your blog. Either way, when you share photos on Flickr, be sure to link to the blog post that’s related to the photo (if there is one).

Also, do a search in Flickr’s Groups section to see if there’s a specific group for your town or neighborhood. I bet there is — at least at the town level. Join that group and get involved in any interesting discussions that are happening (or start some yourself). Share your photos with the group. This is a great way to get your target audience to learn about your blog.

outside.inoutside.in
I’ve written about outside.in many times before, so this is probably not new to anyone. In a nutshell, you can add your blog into outside.in’s system to increase exposure. Your blog posts will show up on outside.in itself, and may show up on its partners’ sites, like local media outlets and even CNN.

Offline Content Promotion

You can use pretty much any “traditional” marketing to promote your blog. In a smaller town like mine, there’s a chance these will be more successful than some online promotion methods. Here are some worth considering:

When it comes to offline blog/content promotion, the possibilities are almost endless.

Summary

This wraps up my five-part series on SEO for hyperlocal blogs. If you didn’t know what SEO was, I hope you learned a lot and have a better idea of how to start optimizing your blog for search engine visibility. If you already knew something about SEO, I hope I shared at least a few new ideas you weren’t aware of or clarified some things you weren’t sure of.

Either way, don’t ignore SEO. I don’t think it should be your primary concern in creating local blog content, but I do think it’s smart to use SEO to introduce your blog to new readers — people who are looking for local information via Google, Bing, or Yahoo and didn’t know that your blog existed.

As always, if you have any comments or questions about this article or the series as a whole, the comments are open.

(This was the last of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites.)

You might also like:

  1. Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs
  2. Ongoing SEO Tactics for Hyperlocal Blogs
  3. 5 Web Sites You Must Bookmark for Hyperlocal Content
  4. Great Content Ideas from Talk About Local


August 2, 2010 | Filed Under Blogging, MY BEST POSTS 

Comments

5 Responses to “SEO Final Steps: Content Promotion for Local Blogs”

  1. Nick LeRoy on August 2nd, 2010 10:33 am

    Great follow through Matt! You are 100% correct when you state that it doesn’t matter how fantastic your content is because if nobody reads it its essentially garbage.

    I have seen better results with Twitter then Facebook myself but have noticed that the quality of visits isn’t always the best.

    Guest blogging with links to content prices seems to work pretty well for me personally. :)

  2. SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 2, 2010 on August 2nd, 2010 2:02 pm

    [...] SEO Final Steps: Content Promotion for Local Blogs, Hyperlocal Blogger [...]

  3. Geordie Romer on August 2nd, 2010 5:34 pm

    Matt- I just got serious about FB in the last month or so, but here’s my tip. A great way to build fans or likes is to pay for them. You may not need to in the future, but it works really well for getting a jump start.

    Here’s how I did it. I created a PPC ad on FB to advertise my page. I only advertised to the demographic that is my customer… over 30, lives in WA, graduated from college. But here’s the coolest part – I only advertise to those people who aren’t fans already, but who have friends who are. By targeting friends of fans, you are targeting folks who likely share all sorts of demographic similarities that FB doesn’t even recognize. Right now I’m paying less than 50 cents per click and even at 1/4 clicks converting to fans, that’s still less than $2 per fan.

  4. Matt on August 5th, 2010 9:31 am

    We haven’t done any experimenting with Facebook ads, though I’ve been curious how they might work for us if we did. Your experiences sound like a guest post just waiting to happen, Geordie. :-)

  5. Geordie Romer on August 5th, 2010 10:06 am

    Matt- I’d love to write a guest post for you. I’ll put that on my to-do list.

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