How to Promote Your Blog Post | Small Business Tips - Big Ideas Blog

Posted: 21 Jul 2014 08:11 AM PDT

We live in a world that is inundated with content — it's everywhere! If you're going to invest, time, effort and resources into producing, you must also understand how to promote your blog posts.

Content marketing is no longer about creating great content, publishing it and moving on to writing the next great piece of content; that is just content publishing. Today, in order for our content to be seen and drive the results we want, we all need to market and promote the content we invest time in creating.

Did you know that over 1.4 million new blog posts are published each day, just on WordPress? WordPress powers about 18% of all websites, so if you take into consideration other blogging platforms like Medium, Tumblr, Blogger and many others, it's closer to 7.3 million posts published every day. That's a lot of noise that is produced on a daily basis.

In order to cut through all the clutter and gain exposure to your great blog content, time and/or resources must be invested into content amplification.

What is Content Amplification?

Content amplification is the act of proactively promoting content to a targeted audience through various organic and paid marketing channels.

It's essentially the 'marketing' half of 'content marketing.'

Before You Promote Your Blog Post

Before you begin amplifying and promoting your content, it's important to make sure the blog post you promote is optimized. The last thing you want to do is to waste time and money sending traffic to a blog post that isn't optimized to move you closer to your goals. Additionally, be sure to double check basic social media, content marketing, and SEO tactics to ensure you get the maximum results.

5 Essential things to double check before promoting your blog post:

Relevant Content
Before you start promoting your content, be sure that your content is relevant to the audience you are planning on promoting your post to, otherwise you will waste a lot of time and money amplifying content that won't generate the results you want.

Correct Formatting
Make sure your content is formatted in a way that is easy to read. Do this by inserting headlines to break up different parts of your blog post. Also, double check of all of your external links and make sure they are set up to open in a new browser tab. You don't want to generate traffic to your blog post and send visitors directly to someone else's website. Both of these tactics should drastically increase the time people spend on your site and decrease your bounce rate.

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It's important to make sure that you have proper meta titles and descriptions associated with each blog post. Make sure the title of your blog post is captivating and also contains a keyword phrase that you are optimizing for. (Easier said than done)

Optimized for Social Sharing
If your content is quality and relevant to the audience you are targeting, readers will share your post to their social networks. It's important that your blog has an image and link description that is designed with social sharing in mind. Optimizing the copy and image for social sharing will help to maximize the exposure from people who share your content. To learn more about how and why optimizing your posts for social sharing is essential, click here.

Effective Call-to-Action
At the end of the blog post that you are promoting, you should have a strong call-to-action that is aligned with the content of your post. If your blog post is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), an effective call-to-action would be a free video training that dives deeper into the tactics outlined in the blog post.

At the very least, include a call-to-action to subscribe so that people who like your content can opt-in to get more content from your in the future. This gives you the ability to educate your contacts over time and nurture prospects into customers.

The rest of this blog post is jam-packed with various tips, strategies and tools that will help you understand how to promote your blog post for maximum impact.

How To Promote Your Blog Posts

How to promote your blog post

1. Social Media

Organic Social Media

Organic social media consists of posting to your personal networks, posting in groups and posting on your business pages. One mistake many small business owners make is trying to automate posting of their blog content, e.g., when a blog post is published, it automatically posts to your social pages. This is not a good practice. Social media is all about authentic conversations and co-creating value.

Here are some tips on how you can promote your blog post on social to get better results.

Choosing The Right Social Platforms
Are you spending your time and resources on the right platform? New social media sites are popping up overnight, and just because "X-book-gram-chat" just came out, doesn't mean your business needs to be on that site.Think about who your target customer is; what social media platforms do they use most?

Does your small business sell and market products for women? If so, Pinterest could be a great social media platform for you to focus on. Here is some demographic research on Pinterest users.

Are you a B2B business? If so, LinkedIn is most likely the best social media platform in which to invest the majority of your time.

Click here and here for some more demographic information on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Once you determine which platforms your target audience are using, start building your social media presence on one or two of them to start. Research the best practices of that social platform and learn how it works to best interact with your target audience in that environment. For example, use hashtags strategically on Twitter, but don't use hashtags on LinkedIn. Once you master those two main platforms, expand from there.

Get More Traffic with Images
Take 5-7 sound bites, quotes and tips from your content and create image quotes with that content. Write a sentence or two that relates to the quote and include a link to your blog post in the text portion of each post. Use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule (not automate) these 5-7 images to post at specific dates and times in the future.This tactic allows you to promote your blog post 5-7 times over the course of a couple weeks, as opposed to just posting it once.

Embed a couple of your image quotes in the copy of your blog post and make sure the images are easily shareable on Pinterest. Even if your company doesn't have a Pinterest account, it's still a good idea to make your images easily shareable on Pinterest. If you are using WordPress, you are in luck! Check out this Pinterest plugin for WordPress.

Join Groups Strategically
Find groups on Facebook and LinkedIn that are relevant to your industry, your product or your target market. Join these groups but do not start posting links to your blog right away. Join the conversation, comment on other people's posts, ask questions and after a couple weeks, start to post a link to one blog post per week. Become a part of the community and add value to the community first — you will get much better results.

Paid Social Media

Paid amplification of content is a relatively new concept. Most marketers only use paid advertising to drive traffic to a landing page or sales page to generate a direct ROI.

Leveraging social advertising platforms like Facebook and Twitter ads can help you gain exposure with a hyper-targeted audience.

Facebook Ads
Most people talk about using Facebook Ads to drive traffic to an opt-in page or to a sales page, but you can also use Facebook Ads to strategically get your content in front of a very specific audience. You can amplify or promote your content to targeted audiences based on their interests, location, workplace, and much more. Need to get in front of the media? Set your Facebook Ads up to target people who work at the media agency you are looking to leverage for exposure.Facebook has a really awesome feature called 'Custom Audiences,' which allows you to upload your email database into Facebook's Ad platform, and Facebook will match the emails in your database to emails associated with Facebook user accounts. You can then run targeted ads to only that specific segment of users.

Think about how you can write different pieces of content for different segments of your email database, then amplify your content to that audience. My good friend Alex Houg has a great blog full of resources and information on how to use Facebook Ads to amplify content.

Twitter Ads
Twitter's ad platform is relatively new, but it's not to be completely left out. Twitter Ads tend be more expensive and less-targeted than Facebook ads, but you can still generate results with the platform.

Twitter has a feature called Tailored Audiences that allows you to get content in front of a highly targeted audience. Click here and here to learn more about Twitter's Tailored Audiences.

If you have a very tight marketing budget, less than $1,000/month, it may be best to stick with Facebook Ads. You will get more bang for your buck.

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2. Email

Email is a great way to get a new blog post out to the world quickly. There are two primary ways to promote your blog post through email.

Manual Outreach

Did you quote someone in your blog post? Did you link to someone's website? Be sure to reach out to them and let them know. Chances are they will share your post with their audience and you will generate more traffic.

Leverage Your Email List

Make sure you have more than one opportunity for visitors to subscribe for email updates. If you aren't currently building a list of emails, you are missing a big opportunity to collect information and stay in touch with prospects and customers.

Here are a few ways you can use your email list to get more exposure to your blog post.

Broadcast
Send your best content out to your subscribers in an email broadcast. Write a short teaser paragraph and include a link to the content that's live on your blog.

The two most important components of sending content via email are 1) relevance and 2) frequency. Segmenting your email list is essential to keeping your communication relevant and ensuring you are promoting your blog posts to the most targeted audience possible. If you can send a highly-relevant, high-value piece of content 3 times per week, every week, do it. If you have a small team and can only maintain a frequency of once per week or once every other week, then do that. Make sure you can consistently maintain the email broadcasting schedule you set.

Newsletter
Curate your best content and include links to 3-5 of your highest performing blog posts in your monthly newsletter. If you don't have a newsletter, think about other types of communication that you are sending out and get creative on how you can include links to content in that communication.

3. Diversify Delivery of Content & Link Back

This is a very simple way to maximize the exposure and consumption of your content. Different people prefer consuming content in different ways. Some people are more visual or more auditory than others and they prefer to listen to a podcast or a video blog.

This is also a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition and gain access untapped audiences while linking back to your resources.

SlideShare

Turn your "7 Steps to Getting More 'X', Faster!" post into a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation and upload it to SlideShare. Start with a cover slide, one slide for each of the 7 steps, a page with a call to action and a link back to your blog post, and an "about" page for your company, product or service with a link to more information.

Maybe your PowerPoint or design skills aren't the best. This is something that you can easily outsource to a professional graphic designer on sites like ODesk, Fiverr or Freelancer.com without breaking the bank.

Video

Turn your blog post into a video blog post. Shoot a high-value video and upload it to YouTube and be sure to optimize your video with SEO keywords to generate maximum organic traffic. Place a link to the written blog post in the description of the video to make it easy for people to find. Once your video is uploaded, you can embed it within your original blog post and share it on your social channels.

Direct Mail

Do you have a high-performing blog post? Have you ever thought about printing it out and mailing it to prospects or a specific segment of your customer base?

Although it's old-school, it's still a very effective way to get a message in front of people. Some of the most famous internet marketers in the world also use direct mail campaigns to drive traffic to their website. Mail out a piece of content and provide a compelling reason for the reader to take the extra step to visit your website.

Dan Kennedy is one of the legends of direct response marketing. Check out Dan's blog here. His YouTube Channel has some good information, too.

4. Join a Blogger Community like Triberr

Triberr is an incredible resource and community that was designed specifically to amplify content to targeted groups of people, called 'tribes.' Register for an account, add your blog, find a tribe and begin sharing your blog posts.

As you can tell, there are a lot of different ways that you can promote your blog posts to generate traffic and more results.

At the end of the day, content promotion is all about taking content that was written for a specific audience and getting that content in front of that audience. Without proper promotion, even the most valuable, high-quality pieces of content you are producing won't be seen.

Have you had success with other creative ways of promoting your blog posts?
If so, please leave a comment in the comments section below.

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Ethical Blogwalking

Saturday, 30 August 2014