Nothing gives a blogger more joy than clicking the publish button. But blogging is not all about churning out new posts every single day. If you want to get more views, comments, and tweets, you have to embrace content marketing. You can’t publish a post and wait for people to comment or tweet. If you do this, you’ll soon write off blogging. Creating great content is just one part of content marketing. If you want to increase the reach of your blog post, rely on these blogging tips.
#1 Share It On Social Media
As soon as you publish a new blog post, promote it on social media. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These are the social networks that send a lot of traffic to blogs. When you share your post on the different networks, you reach different audiences.
Identify your target reader and know their preferred social networks. If your post is aimed at professional readers, share it on Google+ and LinkedIn; if your target readers are more visual, focus on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. When you start getting traffic from social media sites, analyze it to find out if your target readers are visiting your blog.
When sharing blog posts on social media, automate the process. Content marketing can take a lot of time hence automation is key. Fortunately, there are tools that can make your work easier like Jarvee, Hootsuite, and Buffer.
#2 Post To Community Sites
After sharing your content on the major social networks, don’t stop there. If you do this, you’ll miss out on the potential views that may come from sharing on other sites. Share your content on community sites like Growth Hackers, inbound.org, and Triberr. Growth Hackers is a top destination for content associated with growing businesses. It has a highly targeted audience of marketers, entrepreneurs, and growth hackers who visit it to learn from the best in the industry. Inbound.org is a community of marketers, bloggers, and professionals who enjoy reading and sharing interesting content. Triberr allows you to join targeted tribes so you can build relationships with other bloggers and get traffic by sharing other people’s content.
#3 Post To Forums
This is one of the best blogging tips you will ever come across. Whenever you publish a new post, update your forum signature to draw attention to it. Your forum signature is a great tool for getting traffic from forums. In most forums, your signature is automatically added to the end of your posts. In your signature, add a link to your blog post to ensure every post you write on the forum advertises it.
But remember that unashamed self-promotion is unaccepted in forums. Don’t join forums and start posting links to your post saying “Check out my post, it’s awesome!” Forums have rules for conduct and do not tolerate bad behavior. Make sure you read the rules before posting or you could find yourself kicked out. Credibility is very important in forums so make sure you become an active and useful member before sharing your content. Some forums allow valued members to post links to their blog posts. Help people gain insights or solve problems and getting traffic will be easy.
#4 Link to Influential Blogs
When you link to influential blogs and industry gurus, you get on their radar and they might start linking to your content or sharing it. Link to show people similar topics, where they can get additional information, or where they can find opposing views. Influential bloggers can help you to get:
- More social shares for your content
- More loyal fans
- More inbound links from industry-related blogs
#5 Call in Favors
At times, influential bloggers might not share your content or link to it even after you’ve linked to their blogs. This is because they might never realize you linked to them in the first place. But since you send traffic their way (no matter how small) by mentioning or linking to them, tell them about it. Send them an email saying you liked their work, linked to it, and would love it if they shared your post with their followers. Most will do it. If the post is great, you won’t have to convince people to share it.
#6 Email Your Subscribers
If you have an email list, promote your new post to your subscribers. Those who have subscribed to your email list already like you and the topics you write about. They are the people who should see your post first. Send them an email telling them about your new content. Use an email template to create an email you can send every time you post a new article. You can include links in the post and a call to action. For instance, you can tell your subscribers to leave a comment or to share the article on social media. Once your email list grows, it will drive good traffic to your blog. You’ll have comments even before you start promoting a new post.
#7 Link to Old Posts
When you link to old posts, they get traffic as well. After posting a new article, include links to old posts and appropriate anchor text. Your readers will be able to navigate through your website and find more useful information. Internal linking ensures your readers linger on your site. Once they visit a post, they are directed to other ones. Internal linking also helps reduce your blog’s bounce rate. But always remember to add links that are useful to your readers as that’s what internal linking is all about.
#8 Ping Search Engines
A week or two after publishing your blog post, search engine crawlers will visit your site and index it. But there is a lot of competition out there, and you should not wait for search engine crawlers to come to you. Alert search engines as soon as you publish a new post. Google and Yahoo allow you to ping (alert) them when you post new content. All you have to do is simply tell them the URL and blog name of your new post.
#9 Don’t Forget Social Bookmarking
This method no longer holds the power it used to, but posting new content to major social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious can help you to get backlinks, traffic, and more exposure. When other people digg or bookmark your content, you get more exposure and other bloggers can link to you or mention you in their posts. However, be careful about bookmarking your own posts as these sites don’t like self-promoting bookmarks.
#10 Adjust Your Content to Reach New Audiences
There are many ways you can repurpose your content. You can convert the post into a PDF file and share it on document sites like SlideShare, Scribd, and DocStoc. These sites boast massive internal audiences. If you want to reach new readers through visuals, make infographics or videos and share them on DailyInfographic, Visual.ly, Vimeo, or YouTube. You can also use a reader app to convert your blog post to audio like these guys are doing.
Many bloggers publish new content in order to grow their audiences and drive traffic to their websites. However, most don’t optimize the content they produce. If you are serious about your blog, you must be serious about marketing your content. Your blog posts, no matter how awesome they are, will never be read if you don’t promote them. Utilize these blogging tips and build your readership.
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