Have you ever considered using your engaging blog posts to boost your blog on LinkedIn?
For B2B brands, leveraging this dynamic platform is an amazing way to foster business relationships, build your brand and generate quality traffic and lead generation opportunities with other professionals in your field. LinkedIn is an optimal networking site to execute your content marketing strategy while bolstering your overall business marketing.
Before sharing ways to promote your blog on LinkedIn, let’s explore LinkedIn and why this channel is vital to your B2B marketing goals.
Who’s on LinkedIn? (and Why You Should Be, Too)
LinkedIn is the world’s largest social professional network with a mission to connect experts and authority influencers to make them more productive and successful. It is designed specifically for the business community. LinkedIn is by far the best medium to network yourself professionally, reach out to business buyers, build strategic relationships, establish thought leadership and enhance your reputation.
LinkedIn has surpassed Facebook as the #1 most important social channel for B2B marketers (Source: Social Media Examiner). If you are in the B2B space, LinkedIn can be a real game-changer in your social media strategy.
Seven reasons why you need to promote your blog on LinkedIn:
- Create brand awareness and increase your online presence
- Position yourself as a leader within your niche; build credibility through participating in LinkedIn communities, answering questions, and by sharing value-rich content (more on this later)
- Generate quality leads to your sales funnel
- Drive traffic to your website and blog content
- Use as a free social CRM tool which shares what your contacts are doing on LinkedIn in real-time, automatically archives email messages, and offers additional information on their behavior and preferences
- According to Regalix, LinkedIn is now the #1 platform used for product launches among B2B businesses
- Receive fresh news, insights, and inspiration to be great at what you do
On LinkedIn, you can share your skillsets, increase brand exposure, generate leads, and more.
What is LinkedIn Pulse & How Does It Promote Your Business and Blog?
One of the major benefits of using LinkedIn is showcasing your professional expertise by sharing blog content with your network. The beauty of the LinkedIn community is its receptiveness to new information relevant to the members’ respective industries; they are hungry for content. LinkedIn Pulse provides a platform for users to write blog posts on LinkedIn and tap into a network of 400 million members.
Over 130,000 unique original articles are published every week on Pulse. This content is delivered to millions of users like you every week via the email digest, customized to the industry you work in, who you’re connected to and what you follow on LinkedIn. This personalization makes Pulse the first in its class, certainly an ideal tool to boost your B2B blog posts and distribute long-form content.
According to Akshay Kothari, Pulse cofounder and LinkedIn’s product lead for content,
As an author, you have this amazing potential to reach millions of people [who are] really interested in what you’ve written about,” he says. “It really goes beyond a few hundred or thousand connections you have.
As a key channel for professional content distribution, Pulse has the power to establish your brand as a leader in your industry. You definitely want to leverage this platform as part of your content marketing strategy.
3 Steps to Promote Your B2B Blog Posts on LinkedIn Pulse
#1 Write engaging, quality-rich content
Publishing remarkable content that resonates with your audience always wins. The key is ensuring that your content engages and speaks to the hearts of your target audience, or buyer personas. This includes understanding their pains and problems so you can describe solutions with your content. When you understand your audience, the personas you are writing for and how you can help them, your content strategy becomes much more effective.
Here are 8 tips for creating great content on Pulse:
- Use a catchy headline – as with your blog or email marketing, creating a title that captivates and draws your audience in is essential to getting your content read. It is the first impression of your content so make it enticing. A good practice is to mention the benefit or what the reader will gain from reading your message
- Demonstrate your expertise – write about areas that you specialize in. Hone in on a specific topic. Keep it focused yet informative
- Add multimedia – compelling statistics continue to show that using images, videos, presentations, and documents significantly increase views, shares, and overall engagement with your content.
- Create long-form content – not only do longer posts work well on Pulse, but it also improves your SEO ranking, thus generating more traffic to your blog content
- Post during peak times – the best times to post are around noon or early evening
- Always give the call-to-action – what do you want your readers to do next? End your content with clear directions to improve conversions. You will want to cater this to LinkedIn readers.
- Remember your audience…business professionals. Don’t post anything…well, unprofessional!
- Outsource your content – consider using content creator services like Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) that have a proven record of delivering remarkable blog posts to enhance your B2B strategy
#2 Add the InShare widget to your website
The next step is to add the Share Plugin to your website. Plugins are a quick way to drop LinkedIn functionality into your site and can simply be done by getting your unique code here and then copy and paste it into your website. This enables members to actually share your content.
#3 Share your post
You’ve created quality-rich content, you’ve installed the InShare plugin to your website, now it’s time to get eyeballs to your content. Once you’ve published your post, here are a few ways to generate traffic to your post:
Repost your blog on Pulse – You can republish your blog post on Pulse to attract a wider audience to LinkedIn’s community. For most businesses, this community is much broader than those visiting your blog on a daily basis.
Join and participate in LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn has a plethora of interest groups that you can participate in. Since these groups are tied to specific interests, industries, and demographics, they contain an already segmented audience to target. Identify groups that are relevant to your industry, join, and participate in them.
Tell your list – Let your list know that you’ve posted on Pulse and you want them to check it out! Include the link directly with the email message with the call to action. Encourage your subscribers to connect with you on LinkedIn, too!
Repurpose your content – The advantage of long-form blog content is that you can repurpose it in multiple ways to further expand its reach. Create a video series of your major points, whip out your mobile device and share with your Periscope followers, or transform it into an audio for your podcast station. The options are endless here!
TL;DR
LinkedIn Pulse is an effective channel for repurposing your blog content, building your brand’s credibility and improving the results of your content marketing strategy. Begin to leverage this platform now and create new connections.
And if you are ready to leverage a content writing service that will create blog content for you better, faster, and way easier…visit our FAQ page for more information.
