Getting LinkedIn (to your blog)
November 1st, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy
Like a lot of bloggers, I’m a polygamist. I write for one at PJA, and one for The Life Science Executive Exchange, about marketing to life scientists. I’ll confess that I used to worry that our estimates to set up a soup-to-nuts blog for a corporate client, complete with concept, design, editorial plan and upkeep, might seem a bit steep. That was before I realized how much you have to work at a blog to keep it not only relevant and populated, but connected to the rest of the world.
Visibility means ensuring that your blog is clearly linked to any other blogs you write for, as well as other blogs and sites that you feel complement it. Transparency is, after all, at the core of social media. Until all relationships are clearly demarcated, your blog doesn’t look legit, or as legit as it could. Content is one thing you can control on your blog. Look and feel is another. But links are a third thing, and they’re every bit as important as the other two.
Reciprocity is another important component of the social media world. If you link to another site, they should know about it. If they like what you produce, they should link back to you. When we asked the president of BioInformatics if we could link his site to our blog, he not only agreed, he gave us two free banners to promote it, one on his Executive Exchange home page and one on his HTML newsletter. Content is king in social media, or to quote one of my favorite clients, “You’ve got to feed the beast.” Anyway, you’ll never know how much you’ll get unless you ask.
Tony Hung has more some tips on blog promotion at his ProBlogger site. Okay, he has 41 tips, which is 39 more than I do. In fact, I think it’s time for me to print out his list and hunt down my interactive department colleagues. They’ve been positively ignoring me, and my blogs. I just hope I can afford them.
