As part of my outreach for Rainbows Over Ruins, I arranged for a publicity team to help me. They are the ones responsible for getting my radio interview on Toginet.com, arranging for an author video, writing a press release to notify the media about the book and exploring all the possible interviews and placements that may occur in traditional and social media outlets.

My job has been to help them craft the manner in which all of this is presented. It falls to Muriel to make sure that I am comfortable working in the social media arena. I have established personal accounts with the usual venues: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and WordPress. They may not all contribute to my outreach campaign, but I set them up just in case. Part of the long term strategy will be to add an extra layer of professional pages.

When Muriel called this week, she wanted me to understand ways to grow outreach more easily and customize my blog to enhance its presentation. That’s the source of my 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog list this week.

1. Probably the most important task is to blog regularly, at least once a week, if not 2-3 times per week. Once you engage an audience, regular posts help keep people on your radar.

2. To help you do this, learn how to schedule your blogs and other posts. You can do this within your dashboard as well as other programs that have been developed. Hootsuite is particularly good for scheduling tweets. And there are others.

3. People like a clear “takeaway” from a blog. That’s why you see so many posts with lists and headlines like “8 ways to clean house” or “5 ways to handle a situation.” Providing a checklist improves your credibility.

4. “Tagging” posts is also important. Our use of the Internet is dependent on keyword searches. Finding a blog you like is no different. When you are researching a subject, blogs pop up in your search results based on the tags the blogger inserted when creating their copy. Ideally, tags tie into any content you create. If you are trying to expand your reach, you may want to follow what’s trending for high energy buzz words and incorporate those stories into your next blog.

5. Customize your blog. Scattered throughout the dashboard for blogs are a number of links and widgets to change subtitles, add photos, link to social media, as well as a website for the book.

6 Add informational pages to your blog. Just like tabs on a website, you can insert about pages that let your audience know more about you, your products and the site.

7. Add hyperlinks to your blog. Whenever inserting a URL into your content would upset the flow, hyperlinks enable you to highlight a topic and hide a website address behind it. This can be helpful to send people to your website, reference sources or other information that would improve their knowledge without requiring you to write in depth about it yourself.

I’ve only incorporated a few of these items so far, but this list helps me see where I can make improvements. I hope you find it useful as well.

To Your Success,

Susan