A good blog needs a plan to get people to read it. This can be done by coordinating reader engagement outside of just Googling your page. Promote your blog posts on social networks to spread the word and use a digest newsletter to keep your current audience reading.
Your business finally has a functional, engaging, interesting blog running. You’re super excited about the direction your content is going, and the size of your blog is growing like a jungle. However, when you open your click and viewership reports, it looks a bit closer to the Sahara than the Amazon.
What can you do? You need to promote your blog to get those key numbers up. Here are some tips on how to do that.
Integrate Your Social Networks Into Your Posts
Many blogging websites and web hosts allow you to add clickable links to your social media accounts onto your website. This lets readers visit your social media platforms after they’re done reading.
A good way to promote your blog posts is through a “share on” button. This lets readers click the button that corresponds to your preferred media outlet, and a shareable link can be directly posted to the user’s social media page. It’s like the visit button described before but works more as a promotional tool than a “find out more” link.
Make Sure It Can Be Seen On All Platforms
How big is your social media presence? Answer: Not big enough.
Between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and the plethora of other platforms you can be on, you should be trying to promote your blog posts on as many as possible.
Demographics on these platforms can swing wildly. For instance, Facebook has an older base of users than Twitter, and LinkedIn has a more professional base of users than Instagram. If you want to hit the widest possible set of people who might read your posts, you need to promote your blog posts on as many of these as possible.
WordPress has a plugin called Publicize that allows you to coordinate your blog posts on various networks. Once you have a post that’s ready to go live, don’t forget to promote it on as many platforms as you can and tweak each release to best fit that platform’s audience.
Share Highlights Or Previews Of Your Posts
A good practice for promoting your blog posts means you need to keep your readers interested in what’s coming down the pipeline. A few days after release, maybe share some comments from your blog post on how well it was received, or maybe post a quick snippet on how you put the post’s topic into practice.
Relevance and credibility will always benefit your brand and help promote your blog posts. The more people think back on what they read, the more likely they’ll revisit your blog or recommend it to someone else.
Previewing your upcoming posts can also benefit your blog. This can really help promote your blog if you include a call to action in your preview. Think something like this: “I’ll be releasing a blog post on Friday about the impact of SEO on blogging. What are some of your favourite SEO tools?” This will engage your audience with the bonus of promoting your blog post and generating some fresh ideas.
Create And Start Sending Newsletters
Everybody subscribes to some form of a newsletter. This can be to get coupons from your favourite store or updates from your family. So why not create one to promote your blog posts?
There are lots of ways to do this well. If you make multiple blog posts per week, you can use a digest format to promote your blog posts at the end of the week, giving readers a highlight reel of your posts and what they might have missed. You can also use the newsletter as a chance to give both highlights and previews of your blog.
Just like social media promotion, most blogging websites will allow you to integrate a mailing list system into your blog. This will get you the contacts to send out your newsletter and generate more interaction.
Embed Your Social Media Into Your Newsletters
Just like that, the cycle of blog-promoting is complete. By providing links to your social media in your newsletters, your readers will have access to your entire publishing network, including your blog.
It’s also worth noting to actually link to your blog posts on your social media pages and newsletters or else there won’t be an easily accessible way back to them once your readers are in the nitty-gritty of your network.
Conclusion
This advice should give you a good start on sending your blog posts out to the internet at large. Lets go over these five tips to promote your blog on social media and through newsletters:
- Integrate your social networks into your posts
- Share your blog on all social platforms
- Share highlights or previews of your posts
- Create and start sending newsletters
- Embed your social media into your newsletters
There are plenty of resources for social media promotion including WooRank’s 9 Effective Ways to Promote Your Blog on Social Media and CoSchedule’s How To Promote Your Blog With 107 Content Promotion Tactics.
Do you have any tips for social media or newsletter promotion? Tell us in the comments or tag us on our social media. You can also sign up for our own newsletter below.
Next in this series, we’ll be talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Yoast, and why you should use it in our article How To Use Yoast for SEO and Why Double Green Lights Matter.
