A blog can be a great marketing tool for a small business.  It allows you, the business owner, to showcase your expertise, share ideas and tips on what you help your clients with and give potential clients a real flavour of what you are all about.

A blog can be your online personality, giving some umph and meaning to an otherwise static and boring online brochure.

But for a blog to make real impact on potential clients, it helps to have some life in it.  It helps to have more than just you contribute content.

And this is where your blog following comes in.  Have people following you, reading your content on a regular basis, stopping by and commenting from time to time – all of this helps give it some credence.

After all, people tend to purchase via recommendations and if others are seen to be contributing and commenting to your blog, it gives the right impression to a new visitor.

But how do you build your blog following?  Here are 7 ways.

1. Tweet your articles – set up your RSS feed to automatically tweet your blog posts and it is instantly tweeted once published for your followers to see.  As twitter users are already used to publishing content online with their tweets, they tend to have less reservations for stopping by and leaving a comment.
2. Tweet your comments – when you get a great comment, tweet about it.  If there is one thing that people like more than a great blog article, is someone leaving a great comment.  Some of the best blog articles I have read in recent months have had comments that have been more interesting than the articles.
3. Make your blog subscription easy – don’t hide your RSS feed button away. Make it prominent and usually the best place is top right corner.  The more people who subscribe, the more likely you are to have people stop by and comment, as well as share your articles to their network.
4. Offer email subscription too – not everyone who visits your blog will know how to subscribe to their RSS feed so don’t assume they know how to come back and read your blog.  Most people know how to subscribe via email, so give them the option of receiving updates via email.  Feedburner is a great system for this.
5. Link your blog in with your email newsletter – invite your email subscribers to come read your latest blog articles and, again, specifically ask for their comments.  If your readers aren’t used to commenting on blogs you may need to lay out some guidelines – make them feel safer about leaving a comment for the world to see.
6. Email your articles to specific people – if you have a good offline relationship with your network, take the time to email specific articles to specific people and invite comments.  By valuing their opinion, they will more likely make the time to drop by and leave them on your blog.
7. Thank your followers – take the time to thank everyone who visits and leaves a comment.  You can, as the blog administrator, see someone’s email address so drop them a line and tell them how much you value their thoughts.  They will appreciate it and come back again.  And probably tell their friends to come too!

Building your blog following takes time, but it is time worth taking!

What do you think?  Have you got another way of building a blog following?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Marketing Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.