Whenever I talk about my marketing ecosystem, I get asked a lot how I promote my blog. A blog is one of those things that many small business owners feel like they should have—they might have even started one, but have fallen behind on it.
And yes, keeping your blog updated can be a lot of work, next to your newsletter, any other marketing channels and actually doing the work in your business.
The short answer to the question is: Pinterest, SEO, and occasionally mentioning it in my newsletter. But the bigger shift was making the blog much easier to maintain—and that changed how I think about promoting it too.
The role of my blog
First, a little background. Maintaining my small business blog became a thousand times easier once I started repurposing newsletters as blog posts.
I still write the occasional new post, but the vast majority of my blog posts are old newsletters. Since I moved to Substack, these newsletters of course also live there, but I want them on my website too—because if there’s one place online I’d love people to check out, it’s my website. (And, in case you’re wondering: having similar text on both my blog and Substack has not negatively affected my search results).
How I promote my blog posts: Pinterest
Once a month, my digital strategist Laura uploads the old newsletters I’ve selected to my blog and creates Pinterest pins for each (using a framework I set up when I first started using Pinterest). That’s roughly two hours of work a month, and it keeps the blog growing steadily in the background without me having to think about it much. Even though I could do this myself, outsourcing this part was logical once my business became successful.
What I love about Pinterest is that it doesn’t reward my attention. Unlike Instagram, the time I spend on the app doesn’t influence whether my pins are seen or not. Instead, the algorithm shows my pins based on the title, image and description (as well as ‘freshness’).
And this part is magic: once the pins are up, they keep gathering views. They’re not buried in some virtual graveyard after 24 or 72 hours. They just continue to…exist. And they continue to point new clients and customers my way.
SEO
If blog posts are one of those things many of us feel like we should do, SEO certainly is. What I’ve learned over the past seven years, is that there are many ways to do SEO.
There’s the really expansive way of doing it—of pillar pages for each of your key topics—and the more slimmed-down version—in which you make sure you keep your website updated with useful content, and use some smart keywords.
I use a plugin (Yoast on WordPress; Squarespace has its own built-in options) and add a focus keyword to each post. I don’t do anything advanced—but I can see in my website stats that people are finding me through search engines, which is exactly what I want. I’m not an expert, but I do a few simple things that work.
Some of my favourite SEO-resources:
- Free SEO-check on SEOptimer
- Studio Cotton’s blog posts on SEO for small business
Other ways I’ve promoted my blog
When I publish a new blog post that isn’t a repurposed newsletter, I mention it in my newsletter. I like to think of everything I create as forming a kind of archive to which I invite readers (and potential clients and customers).
Other things that have helped me to promote my blog over the years are an interview series with other small business owners (they’d share the post featuring them, which brought new readers); guest blog posts on other people’s blogs and on my own; and lead magnets attached to specific posts, so that if someone discovered the post they’d also find their way onto my newsletter list.
How the blog feeds the newsletter
Every blog post I write includes a call to action to join my newsletter. The blog’s job is to bring people in, through SEO, Pinterest and other sources—the newsletter is the next step, where ‘getting to know me’ turns into ‘creating relationships’.
And finally: this is a long game. I’m not precious about frequency—what matters more is keeping going, even slowly. I can now see that the posts I wrote years ago are still bringing people to my website. That’s the magic of evergreen content.
If this post got you thinking about your own marketing, my marketing quiz is a good place to start—you’ll get a free e-book with strategies tailored to your business.
And if you’re ready to build a marketing approach that’s truly yours—one that includes a blog you can actually keep up with, without burning out—I’d love for you to join me in Grow, my gentle marketing programme for small business owners, freelancers and creatives. Join the waitlist to be the first to hear when doors open.
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