Contributed by: Roger C. Parker

John Dunne said it best: No man is an island, entire of itself. Likewise, no blog posts should be islands. Instead, each blog post should be considered part of something greater, something more meaningful.

That “something greater” is your brand- -the way your market thinks about you.

Each of your blog posts must contribute to your overall social marketing strategy. Each must contribute to creating a unique, memorable brand that attracts your ideal prospects and retains clients by setting your firm apart from the competition.

There are three aspects of creating this synergy: planning, cross-promotion, and tracking.

Planning

As always, success begins with question-based planning. Ask yourself questions like these:

• Goals. What is the emotional response I want prospects and clients to feel when they encounter my messages? What are the most important characteristics I want my brand to communicate? Stated another way, How do I want my market to describe me to co-workers and friends?
• Content. The messages you communicate in your blog posts form the foundation of your brand-building efforts. To be noticed and remembered, your market must view your blog posts as helpful, relevant, and timely. This requires identifying the specific information and topics your market wants & needs to know. You’re not writing your blog posts for yourself, you’re writing them for your market. What does your market need to know in order to grow, prosper, and survive?
• Management. Success requires that you manage your content as well as write your content. Management increases the effectiveness of your content through repetition and familiarity. Repetition builds familiarity. Ideas your market may overlook the first time they appear will gain strength each time they’re encountered.

Content management doesn’t increase the amount of work required; it can significantly reduce the amount of work required.

Content management helps you avoid the wasted effort involved in recreating the wheel (or, in the case of blog posts, new ideas) over and over again. Instead, you can save time because you can recycle and reuse your core ideas over and over again.

Cross-promotion

The following are some of the ways you can create a promotional synergy between your blog posts and your other social marketing efforts.

1. Tweet your new posts. Twitter.com is an excellent complement to your blog. As you’re planning your blog posts, Tweet about the topics you’re considering addressing. Ask your followers what they think of your upcoming topics; find out if the topics interest them. Likewise, when your blog posts appear, treat (or, Tweet), their appearance as news. Finally, when comments appear on your blog posts, use Tweets to acknowledge the comments and encourage others to add their own comments.
2. Tweet your previous best previous posts. Twitter’s contribution to your blog’s success doesn’t have to be limited to your current blogging activities. Every blog post is new for your prospects until they’ve read it! Therefore, you’re doing your followers a favor when you Tweet about your favorite, or most popular, previous posts. You might even consider a separate “from the archives” Twitter identity and category of Tweets constantly highlighting your blog’s “evergreen” topics that are as important today as the day they first arrived.
3. Create synergy between your articles and your blog posts. Use online article portals, like eZine Articles to create traffic to and from your blog. Expand your best blog posts into a series of articles; expand ideas that began as bullet points in a blog post can often be developed as separate articles by adding more examples and implementation advice. Later, create blog posts that link to articles. Each time you do this, of course, announce what you’re doing and the availability of new information on Twitter.com, LinkedIn.com, and Facebook.com.
4. Change the format, not the idea. Remember that your market consists of individual prospects, and different prospects have different learning styles. Some prefer to read, some prefer to listen, others prefer to watch. You can easily multiply your search engine visibility and increase the spread of your ideas by reformatting articles into podcasts, and podcasts into videos. Each time you do, of course, you can link to similar ideas presented in different formats.
5. Cross-promote using your business cards and e-mail signature. Put the back of your business card to work promoting your blog posts. Likewise, use your e-mail signature to promote specific, recently added blog posts, rather than just mentioning your blog’s URL. For example, change your e-mail signature each week, so it always promotes the previous week’s most important post.

With a little imagination and commitment, you won’t be just endlessly writing articles, blog posts, and Tweets from scratch. Instead, you’ll be adapting and cross-promoting the ideas that form the building blocks of your brand.

Tracking

Tracking, or response measurement, should play a crucial role in your efforts to create a synergy between all of the media that you’re using to build your brand.

It’s essential that you only cross-promote topics that are worth cross-promoting! Only cross-promote your most popular, or commented-upon, blog posts. Consider the alternative: why cross-promote ideas that few read or recommend? Instead, build your cross-promotional synergy on your most popular blog posts.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at ways you can efficiently track the popularity of individual blog posts.

Are you a synergist?

Do you already recycle, re-use, and re-adapt your core blog posts for different media? Are you already using Twitter to promote your blog posts? Do you aggressively cross-promote your blog posts with your other social media marketing tools?

Do you expand blog posts into articles, and vice versa? Have you set-up your account at EzineArticles.com to automatically Tweet about new articles as they appear? Does each new posts on your blog automatically appear on your Amazon.com author profile page, or Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop.com?

Share your best synergy experiences, or your comments and concerns, with other profit-oriented bloggers as comments, below.

Author bio

Roger C. Parker is the 32 Million Dollar Author, writer’s coach, and e-course developer. Get his free, 14-page, Write Your Way to Success white paper at Published & Profitable.