You have a blog to post; now what?

If you own a website, you should be uploading blogs to it regularly. This includes all sites, not just information based ones but also sites that are for business, services or products. The reasons for this include improving your SEO, going up the Google ranking ladder, increasing traffic, widening your audience, cementing your professional authority within your industry and converting potential customers into real customers.

However, the work doesn’t end with you pressing publish on a blog post. The next steps are promoting it to make sure the blog actually gets read by the right audience. Here’s how:

Use your email database

This is probably the most important point within this entire article. Don’t underestimate the power of your email database to get your message across to the right people. Email has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to get people clicking on a blog post, so it should always appear on your blog marketing plans.

It makes sense that email should be one of the first ways to promote your latest blog post, after all it is being delivered directly into the inbox of people who have signed up to your website because they are interested in your products and information.

The best part is, email databases should technically only grow higher in numbers and not decrease. Sure, some people will opt out occasionally but generally the growth will well outweigh any decline. This means the audience for your blog posts is only increasing each time you send an email out. And you know the rule, once you have captured their attention with one blog, there’s a high chance they’ll stay on and keep clicking through to other blogs within your archive.

Share on social media

This is an obvious one and something you most likely already do. But the power of social media is so important it would be remiss not to mention it. Not only that, but there is more to just simply sharing your blog post once and moving on. You should have a social media marketing schedule and part of this should include sharing each blog more than once. Promoting your post just the one time after it is published can result in your audience missing the post, or thinking about coming back to read it later and then forgetting. Sharing it on a rotational basis will make sure you reach all of the relevant people.

The post should also be shared in any appropriate social media groups you are part of. Make sure you read the rules of each group before promoting your own work, and take measures to not come across too ‘spammy’. Ways around this is by ensuring you bring more to the group than just your own promoted posts – join in conversations, answer questions and share other useful links that don’t promote your own products.

Finally, don’t forget there are more social media channels than just Facebook. Other ones that can be great for business and sharing are LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram.

Use your sources

If you have featured a person or a company in your blog, it is a good idea to share the link with them. They will enjoy the free publicity and some of them will share the blog with their own audience, which may include different people to the ones you are already talking to in your own community. Send your blog link to anyone you have mentioned or linked to, people you have interviewed, case studies you’ve done and the companies who own any products mentioned within your blog.

Team up with others

Find an organisation that compliments what you do as a business and reach out to do a shout-out exchange with each other. Whenever you have a blog that is relevant to their business and audience, they can share your post with their network. And vice-versa, when they have done something that you think will be interesting for your audience. Don’t force a relationship if it isn’t relevant to your business though, as people can tell when a promotion isn’t authentic.

Social share buttons

Include social share buttons on your blog posts. This will make it easy for anyone who has read and enjoyed your article to be able to share it with their own network of friends or colleagues. However, the trick is not to put too many buttons on there. Too many choices lead to people not being able to make a decision and then they don’t share it at all. If there are just four or five options, it will make it look neater and will also be easier for them to share.

Tweetables and Shareables

Build Tweetables or Shareables into your blog. These are bite-sized chunks of information that are easily shared via Twitter or other social media platforms. Usually these will be a nice quote, a key point from the article or a great sentence. By embedding ‘click to tweet’ within the article, people can share it while they are reading, meaning the best points are then going out to a wide audience who only have to click on the link to be led back to your blog.

Promote your content

Lastly, promote your Blog post even further by using one of many platforms that pushes your content to well known publisher sites. These platforms recommend your content to the web’s largest publishers to capture your target audience’s attention to create long term relationships with readers.