We recently explored how investing time in your business blog is well worth the effort, and shared our tips on how to write a blog that will generate leads for your business. With over 4 million blog posts being published every single day, you will want to ensure that your newly published high-quality content gains traction by letting your audience know it exists. In this blog, we are going to share some easy, yet effective ways that you can promote your blog content for free.
Try to follow as many of the following steps as possible – the more things you do to promote your content, the more eyeballs you will attract and the more traffic you will get.
Email your customer database
The first thing we would recommend is sending an email to your email list to let them know what you have published and why they may benefit from reading it. There are three reasons for this:
- Blog content is non promotional and should be designed to help/interest your readers.
- Some of the people on your list might be bloggers themselves and will therefore have the power to amplify and link to your content.
- They actually want to get updates from you. Otherwise they would not have signed up for your email list. In which case, if you are not emailing them with your content, you are doing them a disservice. They are also people that have already shown interest in your company by signing up to your emails, or they may be people that have used your products or services in the past. Either way, they will be happy to hear from you.
If you do not already have an email list – you may want to consider starting to build one. Do not underestimate email marketing – it is a very effective marketing strategy.
Share your content on social media
For those of you that already have a social following it’s simple – share your new content through your social accounts. However, don’t just leave it there, there are a few things you can try to get the most mileage out of social media and the promotion methods will vary from platform to platform:
Reshare your content
Since social media is heavily biased towards timing, Facebook shares or tweets generally have a very short shelf life. This means that not everyone is going to see your content the first time you share it so simply retweeting your own tweet can be very effective. In fact, buffer.com did an experiment and found that retweeting your own top tweets increases reach, engagement and clicks and best of all you won’t be annoying your followers.
Rather than sharing the same thing over and over again, you can play around with the copy or featured images, for example if you are promoting a tweet, play around with the copy because it is the most prominent part of the tweet. If you are sharing on Pinterest however, you may want to play around with the actual image since that is the most prominent part of a pin.
If you are promoting a Facebook post, you might want to consider scheduling a series of posts related to your blog with different calls to action. Your first post might announce and direct the reader to your newly published blog, the second post could ask a related question to encourage feedback or engagement around the blog topic, and the last post might offer some kind of incentive to encourage followers to like and share the post.
Create sound bites from your content
Another method you might want to try when sharing your content on social media is to create sound bites from your blog content. If you have a blog or in-depth piece of content you can pull out some of the key points and share them on social media as sound bites. Turn long videos into short clips and image quotes. If you have used lots of statistics in your blog, it might be effective to pull out the stats from your content and display them as an infographic or in a graph as sound bites. There are so many things you can do with just a sprinkling of creativity so get inspired and test a few things out with your audience.
If you do not have a social following yet, focus on building your social presence on just one platform where your target audience hangs out, rather than trying to dip your toes into every social network. You are likely to grow faster that way.
Email your contacts
Don’t forget to invite your colleagues, both internal and external, to read your blog content too. Once your blog is published on your website, send and email to your business network inviting them to read your latest blog that may be of interest to them. Send them a link to the web page and ask them if they would be kind enough to pass the link on to any of their colleagues who may enjoy reading it. Why not ask them to like and share your social media posts too.
Make sure to include your suppliers and internal staff in your email hit list, as well as any other bloggers or sources you have linked to within your content. If you have created an in-depth article, the chances are you have linked to other useful resources or mentioned other contributors. It is well worth reaching out to let them know you appreciate their work and you have used (and referenced) one of their tips/quotes/stats in your blog (remember to give them the link to your content). Your mention of their work will hopefully send some visitors their way (as well as yours) so they are more than likely to like and share your article on their social channels too. This approach can sometimes spark a relationship, a follow, and even links back to your site.
Submit your posts to online communities.
These are places like Niche forums and Facebook groups. This communities are generally tightly knit groups who are interested in a specific topic so by getting your content in front of them you have the opportunity to drive targeted traffic to your site. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can or should join them and start spamming links to your site, you will probably get kicked out of groups, banned or worse, taint your reputation. Instead, you will want to integrate yourself into these communities and it all starts with understanding the group’s culture. To do this:
- Start by reading through the groups rules and follow them
- Then focus on becoming an active and helpful member in the group. Leave thoughtful comments, participate in discussion, ask questions, and answer other questions when you can add value.
- The aim is to become a recognisable name in the community. That way when you share content, it will be better received.
Most communities now boast a social networking site which is often a ‘go to’ source of all things ‘local’ for most towns. Make sure you join in the discussion. Recommend businesses that can help with people’s enquiries, and they may return the favour. Use it to share information and keep your community up to date with who you are, what your business is up to and how you can help residents. If you have written a blog that can answer a members’ question or add value to them make sure you direct them to it. Here are a few useful ones to get you started:
Beckenham & Bromley Local Services
Don’t be afraid to partake in some basic digital PR either. If you read an article somewhere that is relevant to one of your blogs, or maybe you have some useful statistics within your blog content that supports someone else’s article; contact the author and invite them to link to your content. Google is a big fan of backlinks, it views them as a signal that the information being linked to is well trusted, the result? Higher Google rankings and consistent, passive, and free traffic from search engines.
Adding quality content to your blog regularly will help sell your business. It tells your customers what they need to know, why they should choose you and what action they should take. Quality content should play a big role in your marketing strategy and when combined with the some (preferably all) of the promotional techniques outlined above, your company will soon be the talk of the town! If you need any help at all writing blog content or promoting your company online…just give us a call.
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