Too often, a marketer creates a blog, provides content for it, and then sits back, waiting for the hits to appear. Successful blogs, however, require hard work behind the scenes.

In a recent Marketing Smarts podcast, Ian Cleary of RazorSocial discussed how he built his company's blog into an award-winning blog in just six months. Rather than just rely on the blog's existence as a form of traffic generator, he worked furiously and intelligently behind the scenes to produce content that best drew subscribers, engaged readers, and created business for his company.

To share the highlights of the podcast, I took visual sketchnotes. Give the slideshow a look to find out more about...

• Engaging your subscribers



• Using blog comments to build your audience



• The importance of guest blogging



• Determining the right kind of content for your blog.