Remember your first blog post? After hours, days, or even weeks agonizing to mold your post into the perfect piece of content, you hit publish.
Your expectations might have been that “everyone” would automatically flock to your site, read your words, and respond. So much emotion, excitement, and maybe a little angst was wrapped into clicking the “publish” button for the first time.
You waited… and…
Crickets…
Although it can feel like all your work is done when you publish your post, the truth is your work is just beginning. What good are all the hours spent researching, writing, and editing if nobody can find it?
What you might not have known at the time was that there are over 7.1 million blog posts published in a single day.
So, how do you make your own content stand out in the sea of content that’s already out there?
Adopt Best Practices for your Blog Writing
This part comes before any promotion in your content creation workflow. Content that meets most of these guidelines will not only resonate with your readers but will build your authority and help you to reach your goals.
Although these items don’t have to do with promotion directly, they are the foundational piece to creating stellar content that will go far once you start your content promotion.
- Be consistent. Consistently publishing valuable content will bring your audience along into their customer journey with your brand. They will begin to recognize you as a credible authority and their trust in your expertise will grow based on the consistent value you share with them.
- Nothing that you write is about you – it’s all about your customer. Start every piece of content considering what your customer came to that page to learn, and make sure you give exactly that to them. Weaving in stories or examples about how your brand provides guidance or solutions to the problem your reader is trying to solve is a good way to incorporate some of “your brand,” while still keeping the focus on your reader.
- Keep your structure and word choices simple. Paragraphs should be short, only a few sentences at most. Each sentence should be short, sweet, and to the point – only one point! Content Marketing Institute suggests writing to around the 8th grade level for best readability, based on your specific audience.
- Use the Goldilocks principle when incorporating keywords. Choose one main keyword per blog post, and use it strategically. Not too much, and not too little. Perfect places for keywords or renditions of your main keyword are H1 and H2 headings, in the meta-data description, and “sprinkled” throughout your text naturally.
- Use a headline analyzer to craft a compelling headline. A powerful, curiosity invoking headline works every time to keep your reader reading and not clicking away from your page. *Pro tip: work on your headline after finishing your post. Coschedule and Advanced Marketing Institute have tools to help make your headlines even more compelling.
- Upgrade your content with helpful tools, pdf’s, checklists, calendars… anything that will help your audience take action on the great advice you’ve shared in your post. Content upgrades increase the value of your content and also help you get started on building an email list.
- Include internal links. Keep your readers on your site for longer by linking to relevant content on your website. Expand on different sub topics within the same overall theme to more thoroughly cover the topic. Building valuable but different content around the same theme will increase your authority on that theme and keep your audience engaged for longer on your site.
- Ask for an action. Before you even start writing, decide what action you want your reader to take by the end. Your post might educate, it might entertain, or it might persuade. It might do more than one of those, but the other part of the goal is to bring them along on a journey with you. Consider how the topic you’re writing about matches with their intent – are they looking to learn about a topic, are they moving closer to a purchase and need specific details for comparison, or are they ready to make that purchase?
In what ways can you invite them further along the journey? Here’s a list of possible CTA’s for your blog post.
- Share your post (make this easy to do using social share buttons). See this guide for platform specific tips.
- Opt in to your email list
- Read more blog posts (make this easy by internally linking your other content)
- Join your Facebook group
- Make a purchase
- Book a call
Promote Your Blog Post Organically
Now’s the fun part… time to start promoting your post. This guide will focus on organic growth rather than paid ads. Organic growth might take more time, but if your content provides plenty of ways to connect with you, you’ll be well on your way to building your own audience that you can nurture and support for years to come.
The best way to promote your blog post is to do it consistently, and to create a process. Once your blog post writing and editing is complete, you could turn it over to a VA or batch these tasks yourself.
Here’s my process for promoting and repurposing blog content to increase your traffic:
- Choose a few quotes from your blog post and use Click to Tweet to allow the sharing of those quotes on Twitter.
- Create blog and social media images with Canva. If you have Canva Pro, you can resize the images for multiple platforms. (You can use the blog title or your pulled quotes on the images.)
- Create a compelling teaser that will get people to click to read the post – use this on social and save it for your email too.
- Use longer excerpts from your post to share on social media with a link to continue reading.
- Schedule these posts on all your social platforms, including your personal profile, to appear throughout the next few weeks.
- Use your headline and a few quick points from your blog post and go live on Facebook and talk about why your audience needs to know this information. Share the link to the post.
- Send an email to your list and use either the teaser you already created OR write extra insights on the topic OR a personal story or business example that will resonate with your audience that will compel them to click to read and share your post.
- Make sure that your email signature includes links to your blog.
- Resend to those who didn’t open your initial email.
- If you’re comfortable being on video, repurpose your blog into a vlog and post it on Youtube. Don’t forget to specify the keywords! Share this on all your social networks too.
The important part to remember is that you don’t have to be everywhere all the time. When you spend so much time promoting a blog post, it can begin to feel overwhelming. By pulling from one solid piece of content and using excerpts, images, quotes, and ideas from it, your job promoting your post becomes much more efficient.
Which promotion tactic has brought the most traffic to your published blog posts? I’d love to hear from you which one worked the best for you.
Download my content repurposing and promotion checklist here (coming soon).