Is Social Media Actually an Effective Way to Promote Your Blog?

Most business owners have read at least a handful of posts that have told them why they need to blog. When someone decides to take that advice and start a blog for their business, it can be discouraging to put a lot of effort into posts that no one reads.

Because owners primary reason for blogging is to promote their business, they want to see results from the time they invest in this form of marketing.
Once they start looking for ways to get more from blogging, many business owners discover posts that tell them they should be using social media.

As they initially did with blogging, even though they follow this advice, it doesn't lead to the results they want. If some or all of this cycle hits home for you, it's easy to want to give up on your entire online marketing strategy. However, before you throw up your hands in defeat, it's important to realize that you're probably not as far away from accomplishing what you want as you may think. Instead, chances are you just need to make some adjustments to the way you're utilizing social media:

Forget About Your Business:
While that may seem like really strange advice, it's actually quite important. The most common reason why business don't get as much out of social media as they'd like is because they only talk about themselves.

Although there's nothing wrong a little self-promotion, the best results don't come from direct promotion. Instead, you want to use social media to talk about relevant things that interest your audience. By taking this approach, people will be interested in what you're saying, and subsequently want to know more about your business.

Spread the Word:
Even though people instantly associate Twitter and Facebook with social media, there are actually many more niche communities out there. You may find that even though a specific community is smaller, by diversifying from the larger sites, you can actually get better results by focusing on a narrower segment of people.

Open Opportunities:
Your use of social media shouldn't be limited to just spreading the word about your business. Instead, you should also use it to open up opportunities. For example, guest blogging is a great way to bring highly targeted readers to your own blog. However, because it is such an effective strategy, popular blogs receive a lot of guest blogging requests.

By first using social media to build a relationship with the person who owns or runs a blog that you want to publish a guest post on, you'll be able to open up an opportunity that wouldn't otherwise be available.

   Brian Waraksa

About the Guest Author:

Brian Waraksa is president of www.RaxaDesign.com, a Houston web design agency. Feel free to follow Raxa Design Twitter.