Hack Brand Awareness with Blogging

Blogging is an excellent way to gain exposure for your business, but without the proper strategy, it might seem like you’re shouting into the void—and in a way, you are. If you feel like you’ve hit a plateau in generating brand awareness through your business’s blog, check out these tips to jumpstart your outreach game. But before we get into the specifics, there’s one overarching key to maximizing your blog’s potential: cold emails.

Cold Emails: Don’t Write Them Off

For all of the ways that doing business has changed over the years, some things seem like they’ll always remain the same—though modernization has certainly played its part. When it comes to expanding your business network, cold calling is (thankfully) more or less a thing of the past, thanks to voicemail and caller ID. You might think that cold emailing is likewise on its way out, but you’d be mistaken. When done correctly, cold emails have the potential to majorly expand your business. But, again, it has to be done right.

Luckily, there are tons of cold email templates that you can adopt and customize to suit your business. But once you find the template that you want to use, there are still a couple of things that you need to make sure to do in order to ensure that your cold emails actually get you somewhere.

Find the Right Collaborators

Identifying whom to contact with a cold email might seem as simple as a quick Google search, but the process is actually a little more nuanced than that. Emailing the wrong people isn’t just a waste of their time—it’s also a waste of yours. So, how do you find the right collaborators?

• Social media: Not only are social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter effective in building your email list, but they’re also great for collecting personalized info about the recipient and their business that you can use in the email itself.
• Do some reading: Reading other blogs in your field gives you an insight into how your competitors are handling their own content marketing, and it might also help you identify who else would be willing to collaborate.
• Research, research, research: Manual prospecting takes time, but it also means that you can guarantee quality, which will help you in the long-run. Again, this means doing a lot of reading and putting in some work.

The Best Cold Emails Include These Elements

Okay, so you’ve got your list of prospect collaborators, what do you do now? Answer: Write the email, of course! If you’ve got major writer’s block, here are some of the must-haves to include in your cold email:

1. An engaging but concise subject line: Be prepared to spend a lot of time developing the perfect subject line for your cold email. Just like the email itself, you want to make sure that your subject is personally relevant to your recipient. You also need it to be short and eye-catching.
2. A hot body: Just like your subject line, your cold email body should be detail-oriented, personal, and brief. Don’t ask for any favors—you want this first email to start your relationship, so you should give them an incentive to work with you.
3. A telling signature: Your email signature should tell them everything about you that you didn’t get to mention in the actual body of the email. Give them enough info (your name, company, title, and how to contact you) so that they can easily do some research on you and your brand.

Get the Most Out of Your Blogging Practices

Blogging might seem simple enough—and you definitely want your blog to read that way—but the architecture beneath a successful blog is pretty complex. Make your blog work for you when you follow some of these business-boosting practices:

• Guest blogging: Posting guest blogs on other businesses’ blogs will help bring more traffic to your own blog, expanding your client base and exposing your brand to more consumers. However, when you guest blog, it’s important to remember that you aren’t creating an explicit advertisement for yourself. While you definitely want to subtlely connect the content back to your brand, a guest blog shouldn’t be all about you.
• Backlinking: Establishing a wide range of backlinks to your site is another way to reel in new clients and customers. This is also something that you can give your collaborators in return by linking them in your blog posts.
• Using long tail keywords: Linking long tail keywords in addition to the broader head terms can reel in a greater number of potential buyers. Long tail keywords are more specific than head terms, thus drawing traffic from users who are interested in buying a product that you have to offer.
• Image alt text: Images don’t just make your blogs more colorful—they’re also an important SEO tool. Adding alt text to your images is a great way to up your rank in search results, helping you to increase your number of organic visitors.

Keep Shouting into the Void—Just Make Sure You’re Doing It with a Purpose

Blogging is one of the most popular ways that modern businesses are generating more brand awareness. It might take some time to see the benefits, but with patience and strategy, your blog can make a big difference to your business. When it comes to blogging, collaboration is essential—which is why sending cold emails is a chore that’s worth doing. So, start researching, start drafting, and start turning a higher profit.