Alright, so you’ve just published a new blog post. But now you can’t expect people to find it on their own (there’s just too much content being published every day on the Internet). So you need to present your new post on a silver platter and let them know it’s there.
Here’s six killer methods to get you started promoting your new post, and if you apply them you should soon see an uptick in your blog readership and traffic.
1. Create 10+ snippets for sharing on social media
When you’re promoting a new post on social media, don’t just share it once and assume that’s all there is to it. It could only appear on your followers’ streams for a few minutes or hours; you’re your followers are most likely in different time zones, with different schedules so if you only share it once, the majority won’t even see it.
What you can do is simply create 10, 15, 20 snippets that you can share on social media alone. You can rewrite the headings and call to actions and schedule a new snippet to be posted once every few days throughout the next few weeks or so. These snippets can be variations of the title, short quotes or statistics from the blog post or anything else that’s attention-grabbing.
For example, here’s two different snippets shared on Twitter for one my previous posts:
If you need some tools that make it easy to schedule posts on social media, there’s three that get the job done:
2. Mention expert sources
If in your blog post you’ve mentioned any experts, influencers, authority blogs, make sure you also mention them when you share your post on social media.
Here’s a simple example:
Not only will you get their attention, but they’ll most likely read your post and re-share it.
3. Connect with people who have shared similar content
In your research, you’ve probably stumbled across loads of articles covering your topic of choice. Make a list with the best ones and then use each link to run a search on Twitter or Topsy to see who has shared those articles.
Below are a few of those who have shared a previous post on the importance of blogging for small business owners.
So, if you’ve written a post that’s similar to the above, you could connect with the people above and send them a direct message introducing your new (and better) content.
Also, if you see a blog discussing the same topic and think yours brings something new to the table that would be of interest to that audience, then comment on the post and share your blog post there. But don’t just copy& paste the link in a comment; let the author know you’ve read their article and here’s what you have to add and only then link to your post.
4. Turn your post into a video/ slideshow/ downloadable guide
Take your blog post and simply repurpose the content into many different forms for various communities. You could turn it into a video, an audio podcast, an infographic, a slideshow or a downloadable PDF. Then share it on YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare and more.
Think about it – YouTube is the go-to site for video on the web with one hour of video being uploaded to this platform every second. SlideShare is in the Top 150 sites in the world, receiving tens of millions of unique visitors each month so this is one of the biggest audiences on the web you can share your content with.
To give you a quick example, we published a very comprehensive blog post on reasons why and how to recover from a Google penalty. Since the posts has loads of information and not everyone has the time to read it, we also turned it into a YouTube video so we could also reach those who’d rather watch a short video than read a long post.
5. Feature it in a newsletter
Another great way to bring more readers to your post is through a newsletter. If you send a monthly newsletter, for example, also include the best posts you have created that month.
For example, below is our April newsletter which includes some of the most popular blog posts that we published that month:
So, if you have posts that you believe should get more attention or if one of your posts has been widely received and engaged with, you need to feature it in your newsletter to maintain its momentum and get even more readers.
Also make sure you have a noticeable place on your site and blog where people can sign up for your newsletter. This gives you the opportunity to put your best posts into your visitors’ inboxes.
6. Create content ads on Taboola
Taboola is a service that promotes content next to other pieces of content on a site. For instance, if you’ve read articles on publication sites like Examiner, you’ve probably noticed that at the end of each article there’s a section that promotes other content.
With Taboola you can attract people who are already engaged with content similar to yours. And you can do so on hugely popular sites where you know your audience is spending time.
These are just a few methods you can use to promote a new post. Are you using any other we should know about?
