Here you are, dear Taskmaster reader. For ages, you’ve made excuses about how difficult or expensive it is to set up a blog, whinging and crying like Kevin Rudd after a Labor Party leadership spill.
Now, in the past few days, you have finally got a blog up and running – and you’ve probably realised it’s easier to do than you thought. First, you researched a few successful business blogs, then you wrote a few blog posts and finally you signed up for a free blogging account and put those posts onto the web.
So is your blogging career set? No room for improvement? Have you mastered the craft?
That’s lazy talk!
After all, what’s the point of having a blog if it goes unread? This is where you social media strategy kicks in.
By now, you should already have at least a Twitter and a Facebook account. If you haven’t set up a social media account yet, here’s a great guide to which social networks are the best ones for your industry. Old Taskmaster says you really need to set up an account to promote your business, if you haven’t already.
A downside to many social media services, like Twitter, is that you’re limited to how long your messages can be. However, you can write a short tweet and include a link to a blog where you discuss the issue in more detail.
For a good example of how to do this, take a look at the StartupSmart Twitter feed.
Putting a link in is easy. Just copy and paste the URL from your web browser to the end of a Twitter or Facebook message.
These links make your Twitter or Facebook feed more valuable to follow, while your existing followers are a good source of traffic for your blog.
And since you now have a blog along with a couple of posts on it, it’s time to promote them to the world – using your social media accounts. So what better time to get started than now?
Get it done – today!
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
