In the first part of this blog we looked at what you need to do behind the scenes to maximise your blog posts’ reach. This week we’re looking at the next step – getting them out there! So how can you actively promote your blog posts for maximum reach?
1. Email marketing
Although it’s sometimes considered a little outdated or unfashionable, email is still one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to promote your blog posts.
As long as you have a good list and full permission to use the addresses, you will be sending your messages straight into the inbox of those who you know are interested in what you do.
And how do you know they’re interested? Because they’ve either signed up or, better still, already bought from you.
There are a few things you can do to make your emails even more effective, these include:
- Encouraging readers/recipients to comment on and share your posts to extend you reach to a brand new audience.
- Include a link to your latest blogs in everyone’s email signature. People sometimes miss social media posts and don’t have time to open marketing emails so this is a simple and free backstop.
- Get your team to personally email their key customers and contacts. Again, posts and emails can be missed. People are much more likely to open and react to emails that have come from someone they know.
(And who knows … your email may even trigger a question, conversation or opportunity just because your name is front of them.)
- Ask a contact to email their list. You can reciprocate by returning the favour when they produce a post that’s relevant to your audience.
2. Social media
Sharing your content on social media is essential. It will help build your visibility, increase traffic and generate shares. All of these will help your blog posts maximise their reach.
But posting once on Facebook or Twitter is never enough!
You need a social media strategy that takes into account:
- Which social networks are best for your blogs?
- What’s the best way you engage with the right people on those platforms?
- Which brands and individuals in these audiences should you be getting closer to?
Your strategy should also take consistency into account. You can’t just pop in and out when you want something (i.e. to get others to read your latest post).
You need to engage. After all, social media is called ‘social’ for a reason! If you like and share and comment on your audience’s posts, the chances of them liking, sharing and commenting on yours will multiply overnight.
3. Social groups, communities, and forums
It’s really just an extension of your social media strategy but if you can find the online communities that should be interested in what you, you can drop into conversations with a huge number of new potential customers with very little effort.
Depending on which platforms you’ve identified as best for you, you’ll be able to search using Facebook groups, Pinterest groups, LinkedIn groups or Quora.
One you find some interesting group our advice would always be to double check the group is active and well moderated before committing to joining and participating.
4. Content leverage
It may sound obvious but if you only publish your blogs on your website, you will never maximise the reach of your blog posts.
There are ways to actively push your content to a much larger audience by using ‘content leverage’. Currently the most popular ways to leverage your content are:
Content curation
Some sites allow you to curate your content into lists and collections that bring together and index groups of posts under the terms users are searching for more information on.
Content aggregation
Content aggregators collect content from other websites and ‘aggregate’ it within one easy to use location.
Content syndication
Content syndication (or blog republishing) is when you give a piece of your content to a third party so they can republish it on their own sites for their audience/s.
Content repurposing
Once you have a good piece of content, why not just turn it into another format? It’s so easy to turn a blog into a motion graphic, a top tips, a video or a podcast. We all absorb information in different ways so the more format your use, the more likely it is you’ll hit rhe tight person with the right thing.
5. Relationship/collaborative marketing
Building a relationship and collaborating with significant others in your market is an easy way to get in front of a new audience.
These significant others need to be people you know are well connected and well respected but the different ways you can benefit from these relationships include:
- Mention them in or tag them into your posts
- Interview them
- Invite them to comment in your blogs
- Ask them to be a guest writer
- Backlink words in your posts to their site
Obviously, the promotional vehicles we’ve looked at here are the free ones. There are also a raft of paid marketing options you could consider but we’ll look at these in the future.
If you would like us to help you promote your blogs more effectively and maximise the reach of your posts or you’d like to discuss how to create an effective social media strategy, please get in touch by emailing us at [email protected] and we can set something up.
