Leveraging Your Business Partners for a Better Blog

Photo courtesy of Anna Cervova via Public Domain Pictures

In my post Partnering to Expand Your Social Media Presence, I talked about how you can leverage your business partners who are active in social media to dramatically increase your social presence. What if your partners aren’t very active in social media, though? That might present an opportunity, too, by allowing you to be the forum for their social activities.

If you do any kind of blogging, you know it can be challenging to come up with compelling content on a regular basis. Doing so reaps many benefits, though, including greater lead generation and better SEO rankings. It behooves businesses to blog, if they can.

Let’s take ABC business from my previous post. For the purposes of discussion, let’s say you operate an online travel agency, ABC Business, and you specialize in the Napa Valley’s wine country. You book trips to the area and you are paid a commission by the various hotels, B&B’s, wineries, tour operations, and restaurants in Napa. You have a website, a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook account. Most of the businesses you work with (book) also have websites, but many of them aren’t active in social media.

So, offer to promote them through your blog–making your blog a hub for all of these businesses. They write posts, which you edit and put on your blog. Each post links to the partner’s website, and you promote the post on your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

It’s a no-brainer for your partners. For the simple price of writing an interesting article from time to time, these businesses get free marketing and other benefits:

• Links back to their website, which helps in search rankings
• More opportunities to come up in search, by having their post come up in search
• The chance to reach people they aren’t reaching now, leveraging your blog’s audience
• Free publicity and an opportunity to shine and show their best side

This strategy has a number of benefits for you, as well:

• Free content
• Better SEO rankings as the number of blog posts increases and due to keeping your site fresh
• More opportunities to come up in search, hitting the long-tail keywords
• A broad set of content that appeals to a variety of people
• The likelihood that your partner businesses will promote the blog post on their websites, in their newsletters, and/or via any social channels they do use–thereby promoting you
• The chance to demonstrate additional value to your business partners, thereby deepening your relationship with them

You’ll need to put some elements in place and think through how to implement this strategy. I’ve provided some suggestions in my post on Bloggers Bulletin, 7 Steps for Getting Posts from Your Partners that you might find helpful. Remember, too, that it doesn’ t have to be limited to a blog, though that might provide the most benefits. You could also give your partners opportunities to promote through your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, for instance.

If you do try this strategy, or you already have, I’d love to hear about your experiences!