If the audience for your blog are primarily business people, then there's a good bet they spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, the business to business networking site. I've been spending more time there myself and as I've been optimizing my profile and participating in groups more, I've discovered there are quite a few ways to get your business blog content in front of your contacts and compelling them to click through to your site.
Here are 7 ways I've discovered to drive LinkedIn contacts to your blog:
1. A link in your profile - at the very minimum. Make sure to customize the label of the link rather than using the default label "my blog."
2.
Auto-post your blog updates to your status. You can use a social media management tool like
Hootsuite. If you use Feedblitz to deliver your blog updates,
enable the option to automatically post to LinkedIn as well. You can do a search for Wordpress plugins to auto post as well. There are quite a few.
3. Add the Wordpress or BlogLink applications to your profile to automatically publish your recent posts on your public profile. Click on the More link, then Applications.
4.
Set up a company profile (vs. your personal profile) and syndicate your blog feed.
5. If you're a member of any
LinkedIn groups in your niche, post links to relevant blog posts in the discussion forum.
NOTE: check the guidelines for the group. Some groups consider this overt promotion and don't allow it. I just set up a group for business owners to help boost their visibility on the web and I encourage group members to share their content.
Join the group and post your content!6.
Start your own group focused on your expertise. As I'm learning, this is by far the most powerful way to use LinkedIn.
[I've been going through Lewis Howes' LinkedInfluence program and have picked up a lot of great tips!] With your own group, you can syndicate you blog feed to post automatically on the discussion board. Members do not have this option.
7. Super important:
make sure you have a LinkedIn share button on your blog posts. Not only can you use it to quickly share your new articles, but your readers can as well. The powerful part of this button is that in one step you can share in your status box AND to groups you're a member of (if it's OK).
[Sadly, I cannot find a LinkedIn share button or widget for Typepad blogs. If you know of one, please post it in the comments. Thanks.]
BONUS: As I was writing this I thought of yet another way to get traffic to your blog...answer questions in the Answers section and if appropriate include a link to a blog post that specifically addresses the question you are answering.
Your turn. How do you use LinkedIn to attract people to your blog?
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