Build a Stronger Blog Community by Sharing and Collaborating

It’s no secret that blogging is one of the most important social media tolls for extending your agency’s reach into the community and industry at large. A blog can be used to share partner successes, highlight important news stories or even promote local events your agency is involved with. Astonish Results maintains four blogs, each with a specific and strategic purpose that “show by example” how blogs can be implemented to achieve various objectives.

A misconception about blogging is that it’s all about content (media), making it easy to ignore the “social.” You can write five great posts a week, but if you never leave your own site, blogging has a much lesser effect. Venturing off your own blog and commenting on others within your industry or community is important, especially when the comment adds to the conversation and you are able to include a link to your own relevant blog entry. Building relationships with social media opinion leaders will only benefit your blog and agency, whether they buy insurance from you or not.

Some of our Astonish Results agency partners have taken initiative and started collaborating with other active Astonish bloggers. Chris Paradiso CEO of Paradiso Insurance in Stafford Springs, CT, commented on a blog post written by Marc Duffy, CEO of Duffy Insurance in Massachusetts. He made the Astonish connection and commented with an appropriate link back to his blog. Duffy Insurance then shared a post by Eastern Insurors on their own agency Facebook page before Eastern Tweeted a post by Penny Insurance. And the cycle continues.

In a more niche-based approach, several clients have started cross-linking between posts about restaurant insurance, covering every aspect, commenting within each other’s blogs and sharing links.

As mentioned previously, it is also important to make connections outside of your industry. Dagley Insurance of Katy, TX, wrote a blog post and linked back to several local businesses they support on the Partners Page. By creating such back links, in a search, his blog could eventually come up when others search for that business, generating traffic and potentially leads.

Alluring blog titles, tags and keywords within a blog post and linking them to other sites can help drive traffic to your blog, but they won’t make it social.

Content creation is critical, but stepping away from you own blog to offer love for another’s work and sharing the knowledge they have is as critical, if not more so. Here are some ways to make your blog more social:

• Create a blogroll, let people know when you’ve added them
• Cite another blogger’s post in your own, then leave a link in their comments section with a nice note
• Leave more comments in general
• Find the top local social media marketing users in your area and build your network through them
• Use the “trackbacks” which automatically ping the author when their work has been referenced
• Include “share” options so readers can “like”, “retweet” etc. more easily.
• Publish share friendly content
  • Lists are great for this “e.g. 10 reasons insurance agencies are better than direct writers”

It’s easy to ignore the “social” in social media when blogging, but a few extra minutes spent promoting and reading others work can be one of the best strategies towards increasing your audience, and eventually leads.

We’re happy to see our agency partners embracing this concept and look forward to building a stronger insurance marketing community through sharing and collaboration.

Let us know if you have creative ideas and we’ll be happy to consider putting them into action…