Blogging Success Means Promotion

Written by: Gary Horsman

You Have Set Up Your Blog – Now What?

Blogging Promotion Leads to Blogging Success

Here are some ideas on where to gain exposure for your excellent blog posts. A blog post not found and therefore not read did not contribute to anyone. You want your blog posts to gain the attention of your ideal audience. You want your posts to add value. Therefore, to promote your blog posts after you publish them is fundamental to your blogging success.

OK – Where to promote . . .

Here are some ideas on where you can gain exposure and some tips on how to enhance this exposure.

First, you need to create quality content. Pick interesting topics to write about. Provide your special insights or perspectives. Add an interesting graphic (or two). Make sure your blog is properly optimized for search.

That said, to have a constant flow of traffic to your blog, quality content is not enough. You also need to promote your blog posts and make sure they are visible in the places where your ideal audience looks for content.

Here are some of the tips that can work for any blogger.

Facebook (Users: 1.79 Billion – Updated Nov 2016)

Blog about popular topics that may be in the news or that have a human story or entertaining aspect to them. Facebook is good for these types of posts.

If your posts are technical in nature or rather obscure, then you may have to work hard to get Facebook to work for you.

If you post to Facebook, ensure that you:

• Use Cool Images and Make Them Big
• Use Images That Relate to the Material
• Make your Facebook Post Short and Witty
• Link to Your Blog

Things to watch:

After a reasonable effort promoting on Facebook review your analytics to see the traffic volume and the visitor bounce rate. Bounce rate is an indication of engagement. If the traffic is low or the bounce rate high, then rethink how you are relating to the Facebook audience.

Also, if you are using some of the other ideas presented in this post then compare your Facebook traffic performance to some of the other social media marketing platforms. Compare the traffic and bounce rate for all the places you promote your blog posts and focus on what works.

Sharing on Facebook is not enough. This is particularly true if the traffic levels are low or the bounce rate high. Don’t assume that sharing a post on Facebook just after publishing it is enough.

To enhance your exposure on Facebook, consider Facebook groups. Set up a separate blog group for your audience. Use this group for engagement. Interact with them. Provide tips and even ask for help from the group members. Whenever you share a post within this group then look to see if this has had an impact on the traffic from Facebook. Note how sharing to the group affected the traffic levels, bounce rate and engagement.

There are also groups that have highly dedicated members. Perform a search using “your niche keyword” + group using the Facebook search bar. You may find other groups you can join in addition to creating your own.

Twitter (Users: 317 Million – Updated Nov 2016)

Twitter is a great source of traffic and can be used to promote your blog posts. This is particularly true if your audience is not geographic-specific. The Twitter folks are more topic-focused than geography focused.

Here are some Twitter tips to make the most out of it.

• Use hashtags related to your niche
• Set up twitter cards for more and better sharing
• Be active (like, retweet and direct message) and find ways to compliment others when you see their good work
• Identify influencers and follow them
• Engage your own followers

Pinterest (Users: 150 Million – Updated October 2016)

Pinterest is the visual social bookmarking site that can be useful for exposure. You need to have good graphics. A cool graphic for your post placed in a board that is niche-focus can drive some significant traffic to your center of content (your website or blog).

Use proper hashtags for your pins.

In addition, Pinterest group boards are a great way to drive referral traffic to your posts. I use pingroupie.com to do research to find the best group boards. As always, you want to be niche specific as this will produce quality engaged traffic.

LinkedIn (Users: 467 Million – Updated Nov 2016)

LinkedIn users are professionals who know what they want to see and read. Sharing your blog post on such a network can produce quality traffic. Use LinkedIn groups to share your posts to an even more niche-focused audience.

To publish on LinkedIn also helps to make your profile more interesting as this enables others to learn more about your skills, talents and area of focus.

Another component of LinkedIn is SlideShare. This is a presentation sharing website where people go to get ideas and to learn. As of October 2016, there were 70 million active users. This seems small compared to some of the others social media site but for certain audiences and bloggers, this is a nice way to share ideas and engage an audience.

Google Plus (Users: unclear)

I stated above that the number of users is unclear. This is because I know that there is a very large number of accounts. However, I have also read a few studies that show the number of active user accounts is relatively very small. This makes me wonder about the real value of using this platform. If you measure the results you can determine the value to you.

the This is a platform that still has not caught on in my opinion. I include it in my roundup only to suggest you don’t spend too much time here. I can say that Google Plus has many profiles (over 2 billion) but that most are inactive. One article on the Business Insider indicates there may be a few as 6 million active engaged users.

Collections have now been launched on Google Plus. Collections are a competitor of Pinterest (or so Google wishes) and this is an improvement. However, the collections part of Google Plus is not anywhere close to Pinterest when it comes to engagement.

What I am saying is that it might help but if you have limited time and resources then focus your attention elsewhere.

Email Newsletter

Your email newsletter may be the most important place where your loyal readers will be. If someone has signed up to receive your newsletter it means that he/she is genuinely interested in what you blog about and wants to read more.

Sending them your published blog posts increases the chances of engagement and sharing. Use a dedicated e-mail marketing service such as MailChimp to send interesting and engaging content to your email subscribers.

YouTube (World’s Largest Video Platform and 2^nd Largest Search Engine)

YouTube is extremely popular. People search it for how-to information, entertainment and reviews on products. It is the second largest search engine after Google with over 5 billion searches per month.

If your content can be “video” in nature, then this is a good place to promote.

The secret here is you don’t have to be a video maker or any multimedia course graduate to drive visits to your latest posts using YouTube. All you need to do is to create a presentation version of your blog posts and use good images and graphics. PowerPoint will make the MP4 video for you with a few clicks of your mouse.

Here is an example of this post which was repurposed as a PowerPoint presentation and then converted into an MP4 file and set up on YouTube.

Once you have the MP4 file upload it to YouTube and use the world’s 2^nd largest search engine and largest social media video platform to get exposure for your blog.

Note that to make a PowerPoint presentation of your blog also enables you to upload your presentation/blog post to SlideShare. You do the work once and get promotional leverage in two places.

Summary – Blogging Promotion

• Use the social media marketing platforms that your ideal audience is also using.
• Repurpose your content and present it nicely on whatever platform you use.
• Link back to your center of content.
• Track your results with your analytics.