Writing posts is not all you need to do
So you write posts for your corporate or personal blog. You’ve learned how to make your posts interesting and you create content [photos, videos, infographics, podcasts, articles] regularly to provide information to your loyal clients and attract new ones. You may be doing this to enhance your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and increase traffic for targeted customer needs, search phrases and keywords.
But blogging is not an “If you build it, they will come,” scenario. You have to do as the newsboys of the last century did and stand on the digital corner to promote your blog. If you don’t, you’re wasting valuable effort and time. You can dramatically increase traffic to your blog by using a few tools:
- Social Media
- Blog Feeds or Syndication
- E-mail marketing
By planning carefully before each post and using the stats you gain after each post, these tools and tips become the keys to your pay-off in the end.
Planning Your Post
Before you send your post out into the cyber-sphere, it’s important to have a strategy for how, where, and when the message will go. Depending on the subject of the content and who you want to target, it could be sent to all sorts of sites and platforms.
Audience Research & Your Influencers
While it’s not always possible to conduct an in-depth investigation into the types of audiences you want to reach, you can make inferences and study data you have available to you. Many analytics dashboards, like Hootsuite, require payment for their services, which is what hinders people from using them. Using Tweetdeck doesn’t necessarily give every detail you may need, but it’s a good start to figuring out who your top influencers are. Those are the ones that will pay the most attention to what you post and interact with the content, making others more likely to see it as well.
Building the Anticipation
Releasing a post blindly doesn’t go nearly as well as talking it up beforehand to the people who will look forward to it the most. Find out who pays you the most attention, and let them know you’re putting something great out there soon so they can be on the lookout. Update them if a date changes or if the content will be on multiple sites. As long as you’ve done your research, this will prepare your own personal VIPs for what you’re about to pitch their way.
Now, let’s take a look at some of these tools you can use to promote as well as track the progress of your posts to get the most out of them:
Social Media:
Facebook Pages
You can easily link your blog content to your Facebook Business Page with the application Networked Blogs or at a minimum you can manually post links to your blog’s latest articles.
Using Twitter you can write interesting leads and connect them with shortened URLs that provide trackable stats to measure your results using Tweetdeck. You can schedule your tweets to show up in your stream so you know they go out when your readers are most often viewing your content.
Use Linkedin as a conversation outlet to promote posts especially if your goals include increasing business to business awareness and leads. If you’re a regular participant in industry specific Linkedin groups, you may find this to be one of your most engaged audiences.
Every bit of content you create must have a visual component which help illustrate your concept or content. Distributing and promoting your posts to your Pinterest account either on your shared boards or your own boards will help increase awareness of your content among a widely female audience.
Goo.gl
Goo.gl is a link shortening service from Google. The service gives you a wide array of statistics related to the consumption of your content. Shortened URLs also use fewer characters to announce the release of content. The benefit of Goo.gl is that you get dynamic statistics regarding your content’s visitors. To use, you input your long link and create a shortened, trackable URL for blog content which you use in place of the long URL. From there, using the shortened URL, you schedule it on Facebook or Twitter.
Remember when you create your scheduled share, you must write a very compelling headline to get the stats to climb.
After posting you may review statistics for each URL/article to analyze best days of the week and geo locations where your interactions most frequently occur. Always review your stats to understand identify which audiences are more in tune with what you’re putting out there.
Blog Feeds and Syndication:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
Almost every blog has a built in RSS feed, which uses multiple standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information, like blog posts. If yours doesn’t, you might consider looking into making that change (instructions can be found online for all types of browsers). This allows readers who like your content to subscribe in their choice of reader, pulling your content to them no matter how you post it. One of the most popular readers is Feedly.
Feed distribution
Feedburner, a feed distribution service owned by Google, provides great stats and shows how your feed has been used and how many clicks back to your site your post inspired.
Another popular feed distributor is Feedblitz, which offers more opportunities to manage and share feeds and track statistics.
E-mail:
Signature
How many emails do you send a day? While there are plenty new ways to cyber-communicate, email is still a primary tool, especially among businesses. Provide a link to your blog in your email signature so it’s being made available to just about everyone that may get interested in following it frequently.
By using these tools you can dramatically increase your blog’s readership as well as track what’s working for its visibility, what isn’t, and who’s watching. After all, you aren’t just writing for yourself or the business. You’re cultivating a blog you want to see take off and give results for all your hard work.
Read www.buzzstream.com/blog/content-promotion-campaign-plan.html for more on planning and tracking the progress of your blog’s content.
Photo credit: flickr creative commons user mwlguide
