How to promote your blog? My tips and answers! | Problogging ...

Posted: 19 May 2014 05:00 AM PDT

Blog promotion is highly crucial to get your blog content in front of more eyeballs; right eyeballs. However you cannot simply blindly go about promoting your blog posts. There are quite a few things that you need to set right before you can think ...*

How to Promote Your Blog Posts Even Before You Hit Publish

Posted: 18 May 2014 03:00 PM PDT

Are you one of those content marketers who trip and fall when you have to promote your blog posts? With a few finely tuned tactics you can start to promote your blog posts even before you hit the publish button.

Content marketing is worth nothing if you don't make use of marketing and promotion. If you don't promote your blog posts then those finely crafted posts you worked so hard on, will not get any traffic and hold no benefit for your content marketing business.

The good news is that there are many ways in which you can promote your blog posts. In fact, you can take certain steps that will make it easy for you to promote your blog posts even before they are published. It all comes down to building a tribe of followers who will help you promote your blog posts. After all, the more the merrier.

Start building relationships

Jack looked to me like he was wasting his time. His LinkedIn profile described him as a content marketer but all I saw him doing for a long time, was blog-hopping. Jack spent his days (and probably some of his nights) going from blog to blog within the interior design market and commenting on everything everyone else wrote. I couldn't understand what he was doing and thought that he was doomed to fail.

Before long everyone knew about Jack. If you posted something about interior design, you could know he would probably comment and then share it to his Facebook, Twitter and especially his Pinterest account.

Then came the day when Jack wrote his first blog post. By then the other bloggers in his niche were all following him back on social media. So when Jack shared his own blog post, it went viral within the interior design niche.

It wasn't an exceptional article but Jack knew something very few of us ever think about: relationships can take you further than marketing dollars.

Everyone was commenting on Jack's blog posts and sharing his posts to their own social media platforms. Jack's success was in the relationships he built.

If you don't know how to start to promote your blog posts, start by building and cultivating relationships.

Be an active participant on social media

Millions of people are on social media. Unfortunately a great number of content marketers fail at promoting their blog posts on social media because of a lack of engagement.

If you want others to engage with you on social media, you need to show them that you are a real life, breathing human being. There are so many dummy social media profiles that it's refreshing when you find one who is active and willing to engage.

Like attracts like. If you are more active, then others who are more active on social media will soon engage with you. These are the people you need when you want to promote your blog posts. They are the followers who will like and share your blog posts all across social media.

Promote your blog posts with a social sharing tool

Have you ever found yourself on someone's website, reading an awesome blog post? Then, when you want to share it so your own followers on social media can share in this gold nugget you found, you can't find a sharing button anywhere. Even the thought of having to copy and paste headlines, make you cringe and you just click away.

This has happened to me too many times. I love to share other people's work but when I feel like I have to jump through hoops in order to do so, I simply don't.

Make it easy for others to help you promote your blog posts by making social sharing buttons readily available on your blog. It may be the best marketing tool you will ever have.

Give your readers a shareable post

Some posts share better than others. What is it that makes your blog posts easy to share? You should always have

a quirky headline that will attract attention,
a picture that is easy to pin to Pinterest and will look good as a thumbnail on platforms like Facebook and
a tweet this buttons next to marketable sentences.

Make use of hashtags

As a South African, I have been following the Oscar Pistorius trial. I can't always sit and watch the trial, so I use Twitter to stay on top of what is going on.

#OscarPistorius and #PistoriusTrial trend almost on a daily basis. I type one of the hashtags in my search box and voila, I have all the news I want. And of course I'm an active participant, so I favourite, reply and retweet the whole time I'm following the trial.

Many people search for hashtags when they look for something. Google+ uses hashtags to help others search for your posts, so why not make use of it?

It couldn't be easier to promote your blog posts than to add the relevant hashtags to get your posts seen by the right people.

If you don't use social media to promote your blog posts, you will soon find that you are writing your posts for yourself and nobody else. So go on, get active on social media, promote your blog posts and become a content marketing giant.

Ethical Blogwalking

Friday, 23 May 2014