In November’s issue of The Negotiator, I covered the benefits of blogging and how to put a blog together. This is a great starting point, but what makes a real difference to the success of your blogs is the number of readers you attract.

To attract more readers, your blogs need to be interesting, engaging, and relevant to the audience you are targeting. Before you launch any promotion, identify the type of people who will benefit from reading your blog so you can focus your marketing efforts accordingly. Make sure you have installed all the necessary tracking codes so you can track the success of your campaigns, and added Google and Facebook remarketing tags so you can launch a remarketing campaign later, if you so wish.

Here are five ways to reach readers and drive them to your blogs:

FACEBOOK BOOSTING

This is, in our view, one of the best ways to reach relevant readers with a very small investment. Let’s say your blog is aimed at local homeowners with small children. Perhaps you are covering a topic on local primary schools, or things to do with children in the local area. Facebook allows you to boost the article after posting it on your page, and select your audience. In our example, we would select ‘Parents’ as a demographic, and select the age of the children whose parents we are after (for example ‘pre-schoolers’, ‘early school age’ or ‘pre-teens’). You can also select the exact area they are based in, for example, one mile radius from your office. And if you are after vendors, you can select those registered as ‘homeowners’. Now your blog post will be shown to the right readers.

The best blogs have to be interesting, engaging and of course, relevant to your target audience.

We typically boost a post for it to show for a week, and depending on the topic and our aim, we would invest at least £25 per boost. This will show our article to at least 1,500 people (the level of reach depends on your budget, the appeal of the topic, and how many people share and comment on it).

EMAIL MARKETING

Blogs are a great reason to send an email newsletter and drive more of your existing contacts to your website. You can either select one blog post or several posts to promote in your newsletter. Write a short summary for each to make it easier for your readers to know what to expect. Ideally, your e-newsletters should be split based on your database of landlords, homeowners, buyers, or tenants. A buyer would be interested in receiving your latest stock for sale, though this is less relevant to a tenant. If you can’t split your database based on interest and send different newsletters, split your newsletter into segments. For example, include a link to an article aimed at landlords, a few of your latest properties for sale or for rent, and perhaps an article of interest to local homeowners. Make sure you track the engagement from each newsletter and have installed remarketing cookies so you can remarket to those who visited your site.

OTHER SOCIAL CHANNELS AND GROUPS

You can share your blogs on other social channels, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. This type of sharing will reach fewer people unless you invest in growing your followers and engagements. However, to get around this, you could join a few groups which target the people your article is aimed at.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn offer groups, while Google+ offers circles. They work on the same principle. If, continuing with our example, you are after parents with small children, look for local parent groups, or groups with your local area as the main interest. Only share useful information as groups are administered, and avoid posting sales content, as this may be removed.

SEO

If your blog article is not time-sensitive, you may look to optimise it for a few long tail phrases so that it appears in the search engines. For example, if you cover a topic on ‘top schools in Fulham’, it’s good to properly optimise it so it’s got a better chance of ranking on page one and driving traffic to your site.

REMARKETING

Your blogs can be remarketed to your visitors as a means of encouraging them back to your website. This works especially well with buyers or tenants. For example, you can remarket to anyone who has performed a search for properties to buy or rent, taking them back to an article which covers a specific property development you have written about. If you have written an article aimed at landlords, you can remarket to any visitors to ‘landlord’ related pages on your site.