This Is How The Professionals Promote Their Blog Posts

The growth in blogging has been significant over the last few years with most businesses now appreciating the importance of having a strong blog strategy as part of the marketing mix. Writing blog posts is a great way to drive traffic to your site through the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefits it brings as well as the opportunity to share it across your social media channels.

However, all the efforts that go in to writing the prefect blog post are often lost by not having a well thought through strategy for promoting your posts once they’re published.

Does this sound familiar? You’ve taken the time to write a blog post (you struggle to find the time so it’s been a while since you last wrote a post) and then shared that post to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and sent out a newsletter email to your clients saying “please read our latest blog post”.

It’s a very common scenario but there’s a problem with it.

You see, the thing is, your target audience aren’t expecting your blog post and so they aren’t waiting to read it when you would like them to. Just because you sent it out in an email doesn’t mean your clients wanted to receive it and just because you posted it on Twitter doesn’t mean that your idea customer has been waiting to see it pop up on their timeline.

So what’s going wrong?

There’s a number of problems with following this strategy.

1. You’re not consistently creating blog content. No-one knows when to expect it or looking for it in their in-box. With blogging consistency is vital. It allows your audience to get to know your routine and the type of content you’re going to post. It builds a following and as long as your content is useful it will grow confidence in your company and an appreciation of your expertise (which is what it’s all about after all).
2. You’re only sharing your content once. Your audience isn’t sitting around just waiting for your content and you can’t expect them to be – even if you publish your post at exactly the same time of the day and week. They have lives to live and businesses to run. You should be sharing your blog posts multiple times over a period of weeks and months. That way you improve the chance of your audience seeing the content and I have found that it’s the third or fourth share that gets noticed – it’s almost like the audience needs three or four nudges before they’ll actually read your blog post.
3. You’re not sharing your content wide enough. Take a look at the list of destinations were we publish and share our posts below and you’ll start to see how much more work is involved in getting eyes on your content. Yes, it’s important to email your clients and contacts with your latest post but it helps if you can get more traffic to your site from other sources – not just for SEO but having lots of likes and comments from other people all help to impress subsequent visitors and reaffirm the idea that you’re an expert.
4. You’re just posting your own content.  The same voice over and over again can get a bit boring to readers of a blog so the most popular blog sites share the workload by bringing in additional writers and guest bloggers. Once you have a busy and popular blog site you’ll get approached by bloggers looking for guest posting opportunities. As long as they’re writing useful content, allow them to write for you. It will expand your blog, take some of the strain off you and give your audience a new perspective.

So what about the places where you should be sharing your content?

This is our list of places where we like to share our content once our blog post is published. It’s not exhaustive and we don’t always push our posts out to these locations (for example, I won’t over share content we haven’t written ourselves) but it’s a good list to start with.

1. Google+ the post – make sure you share your content across Google+. It’s great for SEO and if you have a strong community on Google+ they can get notified that your post is live.
2. Pinterest – share your featured image to a board
3. Schedule 10 tweets over a period of a week. Twitter is a hungry beast and you need to feed it. Don’t be afraid of over sharing on Twitter – it takes a LOT of posts to over share anything on Twitter.
4. Share to appropriate Facebook Groups – FB groups are a very under used feature and having an active strategy for groups can be hugely beneficial.
5. Share your blog to all your LinkedIn groups – And, not just once. Share your blog post across your groups multiple times over a period of a few months. We’ve found great success in sharing three, four or five times to groups.
6. Share to Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon – These sites are hungry for content, free to use and have a massive active community just waiting to read your post.
7. Share to BizSugar – created for businesses and also free and waiting for your content.
8. Share it to Flipboard – I love Flipboard, I read content on this platform every day. Create a magazine to hold all your content and make sure you’re copying your content to it.
9. Make sure your post is optimised to Google AMP – The AMP Project was set up to make sure that content is stripped of all unnecessary content and optimised for fast, mobile use. Many blog sites are overloaded with additional HTML code which slow down the experience so outputting your content using the AMP standard means that Google will prioritise your content and serve it faster to your audience. While you’re at it, you should also try and get your blog post approved on Facebook for their similar Articles feed.
10. Share the post to Medium – Another popular site that’s free to use and waiting for your content.

Some of these ideas need some technical knowledge but most of them don’t so you should include as many as you can into your blog promotion strategy today.