Increase your B2B blog traffic with LinkedIn groups
I am not a social media expert. But I am learning as much as I can about using Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., to promote the professional copywriting services we offer at Bedell Communications. As I stumble across helpful tips or experience successes, I’ll share them with you, such as the success I’ve had increasing traffic to the Tech Marcom Blog using LinkedIn.
There are a number of ways to promote business blogs on LinkedIn, but I have been particularly pleased with the traffic I’ve seen by promoting blog posts to LinkedIn groups. This may seem fairly obvious, but it recently occurred to me that I don’t see other networkers doing this — or at least, not the same way — so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.
The key to increasing your blog traffic is to find the right LinkedIn groups to promote your content to. Determine who is the target audience for your blog post, then search through the thousands of groups to find out where that audience gathers. Once you’ve found some potential groups, narrow them down to one or two based on the number of members in the group and their titles.
Over time, you may find it necessary to join several different groups for the different topics you write about. For example, I joined the Tech PR group specifically to promote my posts about writing and pitching press releases.
How you promote your posts is just as important as the group you promote it to. Here’s what’s worked for me. Click on Start a Discussion. In the Enter a Topic or Discussion field, enter the search-engine optimized title of your post. In the Additional Details field, enter the first graph or a summary of your post, followed by the link.
A benefit to promoting your blog posts this way is that it goes out to an e-mail list you might not otherwise have access to. It also sparks discussion amongst business and technology professionals. However, that leads me to a disadvantage. Blog visitors tend to go back to the LinkedIn site to post their comments and questions, rather than doing so on the blog itself. But for a new and growing business, any user interaction is helpful.
Granted, this process takes some time and effort. So if you find that you don’t get a response from one group, try another. And, of course, share your lessons learned here. — Crystal Bedell, Freelance Technology Writer and Content Developer
