Question

Topic: Social Media

Getting The Word Out On Your New Blog

Posted by Anonymous on 10/7/2009 at 1:02 PM ET 250 Points
I'm entering new territory here on the social media world.

Our organization provides career and employment services to students. 'We' decided to create a blog to discuss career and employment issues with students. Our goal with this blog is to have students to get thinking ahead, share their experiences and opinions, and to rank the readings/videos we've posted and or post a comment/question.

The blog is now active, about 1 month now, but not much activity/traffic is there. Students are heading into mid-terms and the next expected spike in service usage usually occurs in January after the holidays. This is the same time when our short staffed team works on promoting the usual services and events.

Thus I'm thinking there is no time like the present to do promotions but am puzzled on what to do that will be effective, especially on a tight annual budget? do you have any suggestions? will promo items work? a launch party (even though its technically been released already?) Is it reasonable to think that I will likely only see a spike in traffic in January - so don't sweat it? or is time of the essence?

Thank You
Francine
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 10/7/2009 at 4:56 PM Moderator
    Chances are that there is a seasonality factor, with January-March being the peak time for students to deal with employment issues (at least in North America). If you really have a very limited budget, chances are you'll get more bang for your buck in the peak season.
  • Posted by Chris Blackman on 10/8/2009 at 12:30 AM Accepted
    Agree with Ken - you need to be positioning your service so it gets found from now on.

    Posting articles to sites like bNet.com will help - you will also find a lot of resources through this search and you can try posting or commenting on some of them wherever feasible with a linkback to your blog pages and website.

    If you can afford to approach careers advisers through schools they will be glad of the extra resource. Provide them with something they can easily put up on a notice board.

    It sounds like your service delivery peaks in January - you really want your staff focused on delivery, rather than marketing, at that time. So lay the groundwork now, you should reap the benefits later.

    Cheers

    ChrisB
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 10/8/2009 at 2:13 PM Accepted
    It might be simply that it's not on students' radar yet. Are other sites (i.e., your competition) seeing traffic/blogging now? If not, don't worry yet, but do spend the time to make sure that your blog can be found easily by your target market.
  • Posted by ckieff on 10/13/2009 at 10:31 AM Accepted
    I believe that your best bet for building blog traffic is basic SEO, and blogger relations. Get on the radar of popular blogs that the students are already reading. You do this by linking to these blogs and reaching out to the authors via social media. But simply writing about similar topics as the target blogs and including references to their blogs will get you noticed by them. (it shows up in their blog's control panel)

    You should also consider Google Adwords as a great source for some paid traffic and you can set your spending limit to any dollar amount you are comfortable with.
    Feel free to contact me if you have further questions on how to implement this type of campaign.

    Chris Kieff- [URL deleted by staff]
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