How to promote your blog on social media
Whether you’re blogging for business or blogging as a hobby that you hope to one day turn into a business, odds are you work really hard on the posts you create. When you put all those hours and energy into writing and working to promote your blog posts, there are few things more devastating than getting little to no traffic.
Search engines also give more weight to the content shared on social media sites like Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. because it’s telling them the information on your links is valuable. This means that when people search for keywords that are included in your blog posts, those posts are more likely to rank higher in search results — meaning more traffic to your site.
Smart tactics for content promotion on any platform
1. Use WordPress for your blog
I use GoDaddy’s WordPress Hosting for my personal website. But even if you don’t, I highly recommend you use WordPress for blogging. One major reason I prefer it for myself and my ghostwriting clients is that the available plugins make it stupid simple to create better status updates for social media without needing to know how to code.
Another good reason to use WordPress is that Search Engine Journal says that it is the best CMS for SEO. Not only does it help you optimize your blog for mobile, but it features SEO-friendly themes, and its software plays well with other tools on the market such as Google Analytics, email marketing software, ecommerce platforms and more.
2. Always have a fabulous image for your posts
If you didn’t add an image to your blog post before you published it, go back right now and insert a picture! Images are crazy important for upping your traffic. How important? Welp, according to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more total views! So make sure you get a killer image for that post you just busted your brain to write. (Just don’t swipe one from Google because there are copyright rules, but we’ll save that for another post.)
P.S. That SEOPress plugin I mentioned earlier? It will help you create social media-ready images, too! Not only will it give you an easy way to create a custom title and description for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, but it also allows you to load an image that will work perfectly with your social media status update! And, it tells you the best size and image ratio to use for optimum results.
Here’s an example of how a blog post would look when shared to Facebook while using the SEOPress plugin:
Related: How to optimize images for the web
3. Don’t be scared to promote more than once
Let’s face it. There are a lot of people competing for attention across all social media platforms. That’s why you need to promote your blog posts more than once. How often? To be honest, I keep finding conflicting advice on this.
4. Maintain a social media content calendar
Content promotion takes planning, and a social media content calendar will keep you organized so you have a better chance of meeting your traffic and engagement goals. Here’s how to create a social media calendar.
5. Enable easy social sharing with icons on blog/website
In the blog post that you are reading right now, you likely see the icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest at the top of the screen on mobile, or on the left of the page on desktop.
Not only will this help you gain new readers, it also shows the world that you’re enough of an expert in your field that people want to share your content. How can you get these types of buttons for yourself? You can either have someone write them into your website’s code, or do what I do and use a plugin.
Another option for an easy share button is the “click-to-tweet” button. When you use this or a similar service, you can embed a breakout box in your posts of a quote, subhead or even just the title of your post that when clicked tweets out a message you’ve prewritten along with the link to your blog post.
6. Be mindful of timeliness
How often you share a new blog post will depend largely on whether or not it’s a timely piece. For example, if you are promoting a blog post that is about summer fashion trends, it won’t make much sense to promote that post multiple times in the winter. However, it does make sense to promote it a bunch in spring and early summer while people are still shopping for summer fashions.
On the other hand, when you update timely posts for the new year, you can always reshare them again. In other words, just be aware of what is going to be most helpful to your audience before re-sharing anything.
Community: Be active in your niche
While hundreds of directories will list your blog for a particular yearly or permanent fee listing, only a handful of them are worth considering. These include Best of the Web Blogs ($299 for lifetime listing), and EatonWeb Blog Directory ($59.99 for submission). Some of these directories offer free listings as well, but you will be waiting for a very long time to have your blog added, assuming they add it at all. If your website is specific to a geographic location, you could consider adding it to local directories.
There are many social bookmarking and voting sites. Your goal is to look for social bookmarking and voting sites that have engaged users such as Digg, Alltop, or similar. Note that many of these websites are not fond of people promoting their content all of the time, so you may want to consider making friends on those networks and occasionally sharing content with them in the hopes that they will submit it to these networks.
You can also create your promotional operation as you network with others in your niche. Just have everyone connect in a Facebook group or create a new team on Slack where anyone can share their ideas or latest posts.
You need to be active where your targeted audience spends their time. Perhaps there are forums or Facebook groups that you know of, and the audience you want to attract is hanging out there.
Thousands of people are looking for answers on the web every day. You can create accounts on Questions & Answers websites such as Quora, Stack Exchange, and similar and start helping people by answering their questions.
The idea is to find topics that are related to your niche and be active in those sections. It will help you to get your name out there and build your authority. You can direct people to read more relevant content that you have created on your website.
Commenting on other related blogs is a great way to build relationships with top bloggers within your niche. Research the web to find top blogs in your niche and start commenting on their newest posts. It will help you to make them and their readers aware of your existence as well as a way of developing your authority within your niche.
Working with other bloggers is always a good choice. However, don’t confuse collaboration with networking. While networking is all about making new connections and forming relationships with other bloggers, collaboration is the result of networking. Therefore, once you establish reliable connections, make sure to work on collaborating with authoritative bloggers, as it will help you to achieve your potential. When you join forces with like-minded people, you can achieve so much more than if you were working on your own.
Matt Cutts, Google’s former head of webspam, has denounced guest blogging as a tactic for SEO. That being said, it’s still an excellent way to get exposure within your niche as long as you are submitting quality content to quality blogs. Find blogs that have strong social shares and community engagement as evidenced by the number of comments per post and social followers. Get to know the blog owners and editors, establish a relationship with them, then approach them to see if they are accepting new contributors to their website.
You might get requests for guest posting on your blog, and it’s a good sign which means that people see the potential in your blog. The key is to make sure that these contributors are committed to creating high-quality content. From your end, you will have to have a process in place to review and publish this content.
Attend conferences and networking events. Be sure to have a quick elevator pitch about your blog when they ask you what you do. If you’re at a blogging conference, in particular, it’s highly recommended to let people know that you are a founder of yourdomain.com, a blog that helps people learn more about your subject matter.
Email: Various tactics and list building
Don’t wait until you get a substantial amount of traffic! Start collecting subscribers from the beginning. If you get a few people who love your blog on the first day that you launch it, you want those people to give you their email address so that you can keep them up to date with what is happening on your blog. Later, this list will be what you use to promote your new content or products.
You can also use a service like MailChimp that allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails for free. Another option is a service like Aweber that allows you to have up to 500 subscribers with unlimited emails for $19 per month.
This means that you can collect interesting content around the web, including your own content, and send the list of useful articles to your subscribers. It could include anything. Hiten Shan sends weekly emails to people interested in Saas business.
If you have a particular piece of content that you want to promote, you can add this article as an extra link in your signature. Include links to past blog posts in the email signature to encourage on-going blog traffic. Here is a case in point:
You can send emails automatically using one of the email autoresponder services. This will allow you to send messages to your subscribers in the order and frequency that you decide. Often people create full-on campaigns for their email subscribers.
Get Content Delivered Straight to Your Inbox
Feel like a social media expert yet? Don’t worry. We know it’s a lot to process. And that’s only a sampling of social. If you’re looking for ways to branch out into new social territory when you get the hang of a few major channels (the ones that work best for your audience), look into other platforms, like YouTube ( a social biggie ), Tumblr, Reddit, Medium, Snapchat, and more. There are Google communities, vlogs, and reblogging to master next.
Just know this: Each social media platform offers you different ways to promote your blog. Not only do they differ by algorithms and operating models but also on character limits and image sizes, community interaction, main demographics, and the tactics that make digital marketing efforts successful on each one. It will take time to find your social groove (and stay on top of ever-changing social trends and models), but putting your best efforts into promoting your blog on social media will lead to your end-of-the-rainbow gold: more eyes on your A+ blog. Score!
About the Author : Ellice
Armed with 10+ years of experience in social (a lifetime in internet years), Ellice is DreamHost’s resident social media marketing expert. A native Angeleno, her passions include trivia, bunnies, bowling, and social justice for all.
Sources:
https://www.godaddy.com/garage/how-to-promote-your-blog-on-social-media/
https://firstsiteguide.com/promote-content/
https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/how-to-promote-your-blog-on-social-media/