Blogging is a vital component of marketing a tech business. It allows you to showcase your expert opinion on a certain subject matter, build connections with your audience by providing them with free, useful content, and best of all, it helps boost your brand visibility through SEO.

Despite the myriad of benefits that come with blogging, it’s arguably one of the most time-consuming of content marketing methods. The average blog can typically range anywhere between 500 to 2000 words, and then there’s setting aside time to plan and research, before writing it up and setting it up on your website. And so, after pouring your heart and soul into creating a fabulous blog that’s sure to hook your audience, the last thing you want is for it to flop…

Many marketers make the mistake of publishing a blog post and then moving on to their next task, without giving their work too much further thought. In other words, forgetting the “marketing” part of this form of content marketing. 

Let’s be honest, we’d all love to hit that publish button and witness instant results; an influx of website traffic and a boatload of business inquiries straight into our inboxes. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to happen. Relying solely on search engines and loyal followers to boost your organic volume will minimise the impact of your fantastic content and its true potential. 

As experts in providing marketing solutions to big and small technology companies, we know just how important putting in that added bit of effort post-publish is to maximise engagement. We’ve put together this handy little checklist to take your tech blog from a derelict building block to a thriving party hotspot. 

1. Do an internal audit of keywords

First and foremost, it’s so important to ensure your blog post contains a solid number of your keywords: words and phrases that your audience will be using as search terms to find your website.  Integrating keywords throughout your blog content can greatly impact your search engine rankings and website traffic. A good way to do this would be to scan your content and write a list of the main topics covered in your work. Using a free keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Neil Patel’s UberSuggest, explore the most relevant search terms and variations in phrasing and wording. Head back to your content and pop those keywords into your blog post as often as you can, ensuring it sounds natural and reads well. 

2. Use teaser emails to drive blog traffic

An overlooked way of leveraging your tech blog for more traffic is to promote it via your newsletter subscribers. You have a whole contact book of an invested target audience who have already shown interest in your business and its content.

Including a link to your latest blog in a “teaser” style email will entice your subscribers to click through to your website and potentially share the post with their network. Ensure you are utilising headlines, copy, and content that will draw your audience in and lead them to click through and finding out more. Most email marketing platforms enable you to try A/B testing to analyse which newsletter styles work most effectively with your audience to boost open rates. 

3. Share it far and often across social media platforms

Sharing your technology blog content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and anywhere else is a sure-fire way to earn yourself some lovely traffic and website visitors. Instead of sharing it once and calling it a day, use a social media scheduler such as Later or Hootsuite to create a queue of updates throughout the coming days and weeks. Be sure to keep the posts fresh and exciting by switching up the focus of the blog within the captions. Some ideas for social media campaigns for promoting your blog content include: 

• sharing different attention-grabbing variations of the headline
• Pulling quotes or experts from the blog 
• Turning your blog post into visual content such as infographics or videos
• Tagging guests, influencers, and other businesses who featured in the post

4. Build up your backlinks

As explained in our “SEO Do’s and Don’ts 2021” guide, backlinks are a seriously impactful way of increasing your technology businesses’ search engine rankings. Google essentially regards backlinks as “votes of confidence”. The more authoritative pages you have linking to your blog post, the more likely it will rank for relevant search queries. 

Put a bit of time aside to research other blog owners and websites who may want to link to you. This may involve conducting a series of Google searches around your blog topic and finding resource posts and listicle-style posts that link to other blog posts like yours. Make note of these blogs and reach out to the creators explaining you loved reading their content and that you’ve written something on a similar topic. Politely ask them what they think of your blog post and if you get a nice response, you can then ask if they’d consider adding a line to their post if they think it would be of use to their audience. 

Of course, not every response will be a “Yes, absolutely – no worries!”. But it’s worth a shot to build yourself some juicy SEO-boosting backlinks. 

5. Include a generous lashing of hyperlinks

Speaking of links,  you also want to ensure you have used as many relevant and useful links throughout your text as possible. Being generous with hyperlinks boosts your blogging SEO by helping Google understand and rank your website better, thus earning more traffic. You should aim to link to high-authority external resources, as well as adding internal links directing to other relevant posts you’ve written. Take a look back through this blog post as an example! We have linked to useful external resources where possible and have also included an external link to a previous technology marketing blog we have written on a similar and relevant topic. All links should seek to add value to your audiences’ experience.

6. Repurpose your blog content

It seriously pays to “work smarter, not harder” when it comes to social media marketing. With such a fierce sea of competition and many of us marketers already pretty strapped for time, repurposing content is the mother of all strategies.

Besides the obvious benefit of recycling content, there are also many strategic benefits for repurposing blog content including:

• Driving more traffic to your blog
• Reaching audiences who missed the blog promotion the first time around
• Attracting new audiences via different forms of content
• Giving the blog content an SEO boost
• Reinforcing the blog’s message

For instance, with the rise of audio consumption, many technology businesses have gone down the route of turning their blog posts into a podcast episode. This is a brilliant way to attract today’s busy consumers who would much rather listen to your content on their daily commute to the office than try and find the time to read through your blog post.

Why not try recording a podcast episode with a guest speaker or expert on the subject matter, discussing all the points made in your blog? You can even embed the podcast on the blog itself, giving visitors the option of how to take in your content. 

7. Provide useful answers via Quora

One brilliant way to build brand authority in your niche or industry is to simply provide a strong answer to people’s questions, which brings us to the final point on our checklist for maximising your blog engagement: Quora Marketing.

Quora is a question and answer website where users go to find information about absolutely anything from “what brand of fake tan does Donald Trump use?” to “am I too old to use TikTok?”. 

Aside from finding out the answer to pressing questions such as these, Quora is filled to the brim with resources that can give users just the information they were looking for. Features that set Quora apart from the everyday search engine include:

• Users can create social networks and follow topics that interest them
• Quora focuses on high-quality questions and answers.
• It uses a voting system where users vote on answers to highlight the most accurate information.

So, how does this help boost my blog traffic? I hear you say…

Actually, Quora is an incredible way to get exposure to the millions of monthly visitors that use the platform worldwide. Simply search and follow topics relating to your business and blog topic in general, and Quora will present you with the latest boards and questions. You’re likely to stumble across a question that you can provide a strong answer to linking to your blog content. However, it’s important to only make useful answers and not to be spammy! The more votes you get, the more likely people will be to click through to your blog.

Marketing guru, Neil Patel, has written a whole blog on Quora Marketing that can give you even more insight into this strategy.

There you have it, HdE AGENCY’s post-publish checklist for maximum blog performance. The efforts you put in once your post is live are arguably more important than what you do before. By spending time on the suggestions in the above checklist, before you know it, you’ll see your traffic soar!