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How Do You Promote Your Blog Posts? A Simple Guide
You’ve spent hours on your next great blog post.
You typed it out, edited it, edited it again, proofread it, and dressed it up with pictures, visuals, and links to excellent sources.
You’re finally ready to hit “publish,” but what happens next?
If you want your blog posts to get the traction they deserve, just publishing them to your platform isn’t enough. Instead, you’ve got to promote them.
Confused about how you do that? No problem. We’ve got a guide to help you get started.
Read on.
The Importance of Promotion
In a perfect world, you could just publish your posts, and they’d reach everyone they need to reach.
Unfortunately, the Web is way too content-saturated and dense for that to happen. In some ways, it’s like a maze: your best readers are hiding out in small nooks and crannies, and it’s your job to help them find their way to your content.
If you just hit “publish” and leave it at that, your blog posts are likely to reach your established audience (Which is great), but they’ll seldom go further than that.
This leaves all of those high-potential, maze-bound readers in the dark, and makes it nearly impossible for you to grow your following.
Because of this, promotion is essential. In addition to helping you build a presence online, good blog promotion helps you find readers that want to interact with your brand. This, in turn, ensures that your posts are getting the attention they deserve rather than floating on the same stagnant pool of readers.
Before you Promote: 3 Must-Dos for Your New Blog Posts
While I’ve got some effective promotion tips to help your blogs gain traction, we’ve got to talk about what to do before you promote your blogs, first.
You see, while it’s not enough to just hit “publish,” it’s also not enough to just promote blogs you haven’t also taken the time to perfect. Without the proper attention, it’s easy for typos and inaccuracies to slip by in your content, so proofing is necessary for tractionable posts. Here are three things you need to do before you start the blog promotion process:
1. Proofread
Even if you know the difference between there and their, mistakes like this slip into content and a simple proofread is all you need to prevent them from going public. While you should always read through your posts the good, old-fashioned way, there’s also a myriad of other tools to help you clean up your content. These include the following:
- Spell check – You should always, always run your content through spell check. A simple spell check like the one found in most word processing programs is ideal for a first check, but services like Grammarly offer more in-depth spell check services for more advanced proofreading.
- Plagiarism Checker – There are millions of pieces of content on the Web, and it’s important to make sure that the blog posts you write are original. Even if you’re not word-for-word copying someone else’s piece, plagiarism happens when you accidentally (or unknowingly) lift words or phrases from external content. Make sure your blog posts are clear by using a service like Grammarly or Copyscape to check for plagiarism before you promote or publish.
- Grammar Checker – You may think that a spell checking service is sufficient to check your grammar, as well. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Instead, run your blog posts through a grammar checker (again, like Grammarly), as well. This helps catch sneaky grammar mistakes and keep your content professional and promotable.
- Hire a proofreader – Once you’ve gone through your content on your own, it’s helpful to have a second set of eyes give it a look. Even if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional editor or proofreader, it’s easy to give your content a final check by asking a friend or family member to read it. Often, a third party can catch mistakes you don’t and offer useful insight into the flow and structure of your content.
2. Insert a CTA
The end of every blog post you write should include a CTA. This CTA can be an ask (“click here to download our complete guide today!”) or a question, like this one at the bottom of a Social Media Examiner post:
Regardless of whether you choose to include a traditional CTA or a question aimed at starting a discussion, inserting some send-off to the end of your posts is critical. This simple step helps boost engagement and promote social shares on your content. In fact, to really increase social shares, you could simply say something like “Like this post? Share it on Facebook!”
This approach helps you promote and publicize your blog posts all at once.
3. Format your content
Good formatting is essential for readable content.
To make your content as attractive and welcoming as possible, give it a once-over before you publish and promote it. Are your paragraphs broken into two- or three-sentence chunks? Are you using bolded headers and subheaders, links, bullets, and lists? Is your text broken up by visuals and screenshots?
Content that features all of these things is easier and more enjoyable to read, and virtually promotes itself once you make it public.
How to Promote Your Blogs
Now that we’ve talked about why it’s so important to perfect and promote your blogs let’s talk about how to do it. There are dozens of ways to promote your blogs, but the following tactics are some of my personal favorites:
1. Internal linking
Internal linking isn’t a flashy promotion strategy, but it works.
If you’ve been blogging correctly, you likely have a bank of evergreen posts built up. These blogs are probably the ones that earn you the most traffic and fetch the most views month after month.
One great way to promote a new blog post is to insert an anchor text link to said post into these older posts. This achieves two purposes at once. In addition to boosting the SEO of the original article, it also encourages people reading your evergreen post to explore your new post.
While this can’t be your only promotion strategy, it should go hand-in-hand with any other promotional plan you choose to undertake.
2. Get involved in Facebook groups
Facebook groups are a fantastic niche platform for blog promotion. In addition to the fact that Facebook groups bring interested parties into one easily accessible and organized area, they also make it easy to share and engage with content.
Keep in mind, though, that a Facebook group can’t just be a promotion strategy. The whole point of Facebook groups is to build relationships. For the platform to work for blog promotion, you need to spend plenty of time there beforehand, interacting with other group members, sharing non-promotional content and building relationships.
This gives you the trust and authority needed to promote your blog posts effectively.
Once you’ve established yourself in a Facebook group, you can contribute to relevant conversations by sharing your most recent blog post and asking a question that spurs a conversation. This tactic works on two levels: In addition to getting your post out there in front of a lot of people, it also creates a conversation around your post, which is ideal for social sharing and long-lasting engagement.
For more information on how to use social media groups to your advantage, check out our post on the topic.
3. Leverage LinkedIn
Just like Facebook is an efficient platform for promotion, so is LinkedIn. The B2B social platform of choice, LinkedIn can be a fantastic place to promote blog content and get high-quality, industry-specific feedback.
While LinkedIn as a whole is ideal for this, LinkedIn groups are an even better place for blog promotion. Roughly 81 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for promotional purposes. This makes sense since LinkedIn users are the most receptive to marketing messages. With this in mind, LinkedIn groups are the ideal places to leverage your audience for new blog posts.
For the best promotional results in LinkedIn groups, focus on about three groups at a time. These groups should be the ones that are most closely aligned with your target audience. Bonus points if you can find groups with small-ish membership, because it’s easier to create authentic engagement in smaller groups.
Once you’ve located your choice LinkedIn groups, get to work joining the conversation. As is true with Facebook groups, it’s wise to spend some time establishing yourself in the group before you drop in with a promotion.
Get involved in the group’s most popular discussions and don’t be shy about sharing other (non-promotional) content that helps to answer questions or resolve issues. Once you’ve established yourself as a trustworthy and consistent member of the group, you can start using your blogs as a way to add value.
Point readers toward a recent blog that helps address their pain points or adds insight to a problem they’re struggling with. While you’ll need to keep up your non-promotional interaction, as well, LinkedIn groups are a fantastic place to harvest niche interest for your posts.
4. Create visuals for your content
Posts with photos get 39 percent more engagement than text-only posts, so it’s wise to dress yours up with some unique visuals. In addition to promoting social shares (and thus more traffic) adding unique visuals to your blog posts is a fantastic way to make them more attractive to social media and to flesh out your points more fully.
For the best promotional results, go beyond your standard stock photo. All images are not created equal, and a custom visual, infographic, or meme will perform better than a cheesy picture of a “shocked office worker” or something of the sort.
5. Push your new post out to your e-mail list
If you’ve done the homework of building an e-mail subscriber list, now is the time to leverage it to your benefit. When you publish a new blog post, send it out to your subscribers.
In addition to being one of the easiest ways to distribute new content (mainly thanks to things like MailChimp’s simple, savable e-mail templates), e-mailing a new post to your followers is a great way to let the ones who may have missed it on other channels know the post is there.
For an example of a blogger who does this well, consider Mark Manson. Here’s an example of a recent e-mail I received from him in my inbox:
Even if you’re not a fan of Manson’s snarky voice, he’s done pretty much everything right in this promotional e-mail.
The subject line (“Ok, I may have gone too far this time…”) is attention-grabbing, the e-mail is well-formatted and easy to read, and it includes all relevant information (link to the new post and information about an impending live-stream) for readers.
Simple, succinct, and to-the-point, this is how you do a promotional e-mail.
Great Blog Promotion is Just Around the Corner
Your blog posts deserve attention, and good promotion methods are the way to secure that.
Even if you write the best blog post in the world, you’re not going to get the traffic you deserve if you don’t promote and publicize it. Luckily, these five simple tactics can help you gain a following and encourage reader engagement for your blog.
Regardless of whether you choose to join LinkedIn or Facebook groups, e-mail your post to your subscribers, or use some combination of the three tactics, promotion is a critical piece of securing success for your posts. When you promote your blog posts efficiently, you gain more traffic, earn more followers, and get the maximum level of traction possible from your hard-won posts.
This, in turn, helps you become the blogging super power you know you are.
Julia McCoy is a bestselling author of So You Think You Can Write, podcaster and an expert content marketer. She’s also the founder and CEO of Express Writers, a leading online content creation agency, with more than 60 content writers and strategists. Julia leads her team to serve hundreds of worldwide businesses with the highest-quality content for their online presence. Follow Julia’s blog.
The post How Do You Promote Your Blog Posts? A Simple Guide appeared first on SiteProNews.
Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2016/10/11/how-do-you-promote-your-blog-posts-a-simple-guide/
