How do you promote your blog posts? Do you share it once on social media once and cross your fingers? Of course not! You’ve taken time and effort to choose your topic and write the blessed thing, so you need to do everything you can to promote your blog posts for maximum reach.
To help you do this, here are our top tips for maximising the reach of your blog posts.
1. Get your hosting right
Promoting your blog post for maximum reach begins during pre-promotion. The platform you use to host your blog needs to be just right so:
- Get your SEO right. Make sure the search engines you’re your blog and it’s easy for visitors to navigate around your site once they arrive.
- Use a reliable host. You won’t generate repeat traffic if your site’s down the first time someone clicks through.
- Similarly, make sure it loads quickly. People won’t hand around for a site to load. Your blog has literally infinite competition so you can’t risk anything that would make a visitor bounce.
- Get your indexing and crawling right. Do everything you can to make sure your blog is fully findable.
- Increase your internal links. Which pages and past blogs should your latest blog link to?
- Increase your external links. Link key words to either high profile or high traffic sites run by sources your readers will trust.
- Get rid of broken links. They’re another irritation for readers.
- Stay on top of your analytics. If you know which blogs/topics/formats/approached pull best, you can use them to maximise the reach of upcoming blogs.
2. Get your content right
If you want to maximise your readership you will need to write about the right things. You can do this by:
- Choosing your niche. You work in your market so you know what people are talking about and/or interested in but it’s also worth checking Google Trends to monitor how current interest levels are performing.
- Research keywords. Once you’ve chosen your niche, find out which keywords and search queries sit alongside this niche then weave these keywords into your posts.
- Know your audience. Build up a picture of your ultimate reader. What format do they want? What tone of voice do they respond to? What length of post do they want? And what call-to-action will entice them?
- Decide on your voice. Are you academic, informative, funny, formal or conversational? Much of this will come from knowing your audience but once you’ve chosen, stick to it! Like all good marketing, blogging needs consistency!
3. Get your on-page SEO right
Once you’ve written your post, make sure you’ve done everything you can to help Google find it for all the right reasons. This involves:
- Adding meta tags to your title, URL, and description
- Including your keywords in your URL, page title, main heading (H1), first paragraph and H2 and H3 subheadings
- Optimising any images you use by adding their dimensions, file size and alt text
4. Get your reader engagement right
Once you get someone on to your blog, try and connect with them. Here are some easy ways to do this:
- Make it easy to sign up for automatic future updates
- Encourage social sharing by adding social sharing buttons … and telling your readers you want them to use them!
- Ask them for ideas for future posts and make it as easy as possible for them to send those ideas to you (and always respond when they do)
5. Get your layout right
Remember that you’re being read online so make it as easy as possible.
Images will help break things up but the main thing is to break up the paragraphs so there’s plenty of white space.
You can even give your most important points their own line so they stand out even more.
And use sub-headings to draw the eye to specific points the reader might want most (something that will also help your SEO).
These are our tips for the nuts and bolts of producing blogs that can maximise their reach. In part 2 we’ll look at how you can actively promote your blog once it’s live but if you need any help with the digital and SEO aspects of your blog in the meantime, please get in touch by emailing us at [email protected].
