In my last two installments on Creating and Maintaining a B2B Blog, I offered suggestions on who should write your company blog, how often you should post and how to develop a content strategy for your blog.

In this third installment of my blogging series, I’d like to make some suggestions on how to promote your blog.

If you are going to invest the time, resources and discipline to create a blog you’ll want to be sure it’s getting read. It is not as simple as, “Build it and they will come.” You’ll need to promote your blog, let people know it exists. Consider all the tactics you can use to announce and then promote your blog including email, your website, search and other blogs. You’ll need to be proactive. Think about active and passive forms of promotion. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Start with your company website. Make sure there is a link to your blog somewhere on your site, or multiple pages if relevant. And don’t just place the link anywhere. If the information is important and relevant to your audience, really promote it – your home page just might be the best place.

2. Add it to your email signature. Write a brief description and add a link to your blog on your email signature. This is a quick and simple promotional tactic.

3. Post comments on other blogs. At the end of your comments add your signature and a link to your blog. Remember, even your posts on other blogs must still be as sincere, relevant and valuable as the content on your blog.

4. Optimize your blog for search. Just as with your website, the title of your blog is important. Web spiders crawl these headers just as they do for websites. Be sure your header or title includes your important keywords. Remember to make your blog search-friendly.

5. Repeat the title of your blog, or a reworded version of the title as the first sentence of the body copy of your blog. Makes your blog even more search-friendly.

6. Optimize your content. Repeat the keywords and key phrases from your title throughout the body of your blog. Include keywords that your audience might use when performing a search. Remember, use this suggestion with some caution, your copy must still be well written, include relevant information and demonstrate value. Write your content first, then edit to she where keyword additions might work without giving the reader a headache.

7. Add photos, diagrams and graphs. And you can insure these help with search results by adding alt tags to these images. The tag should include text using those same keywords you used in your title.

8 Post often. Frequent posts improve search performance.

9. Think like a blogger. What does this mean? Simply blog. Read blogs, bookmark those you find worthwhile. Get a sense of their style and their frequency. Read both your industry-specific blogs and blogs about blogging. Two I like include problogger.net and socialmediab2b.com

Look for my next installment of Creating and Maintaining a B2B Blog when I’ll discuss how blogs can support and promote your brand.