Publishing & Promoting [Blog Writing Series #7]
Part 1: Ideas & Research for blogs. Part 2: Frameworks. Part 3: Actually writing. Part 4: Bonus Blog Elements. Part 5: Editing Your Writing. Part 6: Optimizing Your Blog.
If you’ve been following all the steps in the process so far, you are ready to hit publish on your article.
Woohoo!
Don’t forget to celebrate every time you get to publish something. Writing a blog is no easy feat (especially if you’re following this intense framework), so in order to find the motivation to soon do it again, don’t forget to give yourself some credit when you make it through.
Now, how do I actually get people to read my blog?
Read on to find out.
Publishing & Promoting
These two things are similar but certainly not the same.
Many first-time bloggers have the incorrect philosophy of Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. This could not be less true.
Ok, I’m exaggerating a little. Ideally, with time, you will attract new blog readers organically, but especially in the beginning (and, really, in general this is just good practice), we need to work to attract our readers.
How do we do that?
In general, promoting your blog article is similar to how you promote anything, but I’ll try to give you some of my super practical tips, and highlight a few other things people often forget or just don’t know about promotion and blogging.
1. Social Media
This is the obvious place to start, and possibly your most effective.
Use whatever social media channels you are active on to promote your newest blog. There might be varying opinions on this, but I am a fan of promoting the same piece of content across multiple channels all at the same time. It sort of allows you to double-dip on your efforts to put a post together. (See #5 below for more thoughts on this)
What platforms should I use?
Tough call. Entirely dependent on your market, and what you’ll be enthusiastic about using. If you’re only going to passively use a particular social media channel, it’s probably not worth it.
Facebook and Instagram are the two biggest, as far as I’m concerned. Youtube is difficult to classify as a social media channel, but it is definitely something not to be overlooked in your marketing efforts. Twitter and Pinterest are special-interest social media channels that aren’t applicable for every form of business or marketing.
LinkedIn, as of the time I’m writing this blog, seems to be the big one to sort of watch out for. It gets a lot of organic reach (meaning, without paying for it) and the number of professionals that use it seems to be steadily growing. I’d recommend checking it out if you think there’s a chance your audience might use LinkedIn on any level.
On all of these platforms:
You’ll want to post a graphic (usually) and a small snippet of your article. Maybe it’s the SEO description you wrote prior to publishing. Whatever it is, you want to create interest, and then have the link where the reader needs to follow to learn more. This is where you also utilize your Call to Action skills and realize the benefit of a short URL.
2. Email Marketing
If you haven’t dipped your toes into the email marketing world, this might not make sense right away. That being said, starting a blog (if you plan to contribute regularly) can be a good excuse to learn email marketing and start putting it to work for you.
If you already have email lists that could benefit or might be even just mildly interested in your blog, send them a message letting them know.
Of course, as with all email marketing, use this wisely. Don’t abuse the privilege of having someone’s email subscription. Notify them only when it’s important, and share valuable content. Experiment with linking to the website or just pasting the whole article in the email. See what one benefits you the most. (Though if you’re pasting the whole article in, you need a CTA at the bottom.)
3. Word of Mouth
Don’t underestimate how many views your blog will get by telling people about it. In fact, when you endeavour to start a blog, you should also be endeavouring to always talking about it. The more you write, the more you will naturally have lots to reference (“Yeah that’s so funny! I wrote an article on that very thing you can check out on my blog…”).
Your friends, family, and peers are going to be the biggest source of blog traffic if you’re starting from scratch. Be cautious about not annoying old or current clients with your blog if you wanna reach out to them. While your blog is the coolest thing in the world to you, to them, it might just be a blog (which, to some people, is Latin for “thing I’ll never read”).
4. Soliciting shares
If you wanna try to connect with other people or businesses with similar success levels to yours, you can try to offer an exchange of promotion for each of your content. Be really really cautious with this though: you should never be cold-calling someone and trying to ask them for help right off the bat. At the very soonest, you should be warm-calling someone, which is reaching out only after you’ve built up a meaningful relationship over the course of time. This way they are already warmed up to you and hopefully like you.
If you’re reaching out to the Big Dogs of your industry or influencers who are similar, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you have more to gain than they do about sharing your content, you probably shouldn’t expect to be well received.
Other things to keep in mind:
5. It is ok to share your blog again
Don’t think that you only are allowed to post about your blog once on Instagram or Facebook and that’s it. In fact, you should probably almost never only post about something once.
It’s all too easy to scroll past something a time or two and either fail to notice it or not have it pique your interest.
Different studies have shown that sometimes people need to see or hear something 7 different times before it really settles in. I have mixed feelings about the exact number, but I like the philosophy: repetition breeds formation. We shape people’s attitudes (clicking on our blog) the more we get them to do it. And the way we get them to do it is by talking about what we want them to do (without being obnoxious and driving people away. Although many tactics might bring you borderline, and that’s ok).
6. Don’t forget to crosslink TO your blog from others
Remember how crosslinking blogs was a really important strategy when we were writing this blog? Go back through your catalogue and see if there’s any blogs that can now benefit from having a link to the newest piece of content.
The more interconnected your content can be, the better for you. Don’t neglect the new stuff.
7. Refreshing your article is encouraged
Not now, because you just hit publish, but in a couple months from today, feel free to update any pieces of your article that may have become outdated, might’ve been worded weirdly, or otherwise could be updated with new information.
Studies have shown that this can sometimes have as big an impact on your SEO as publishing an entirely new article. That’s massive when you consider the time savings.
It’s important not to go too far into rewrite territory, or you might be better off removing that blog altogether and starting fresh. Google doesn’t like it if you rewrite too much of your article (I’d wager anything over 40%). But if you’re under that threshold, it might help you out to periodically update what you wrote.
You did it!
That’s about it! You wrote a blog! You followed all the steps, you published it and you promoted it. That’s amazing.
Now… get ready to start back at the beginning and do it all over again 😀
Don’t worry. The more often you repeat this process, the faster you’ll become. (Repetition breeds formation, remember?)
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