Killer Ways and Strategies to Promote Your Latest Blog Post

The wide use of internet’s digital channels in the business world today has forced most businesses to create websites. The use of websites has many advantages for the vast majority of companies. However, owning a website today is no longer enough to gain online exposure. You ought to seek ways to get your site ahead of the online crowd. One of the ways to do this is by promoting the content of your website.

Why You Should Promote Your Content

A rich content means a healthy ROI. This is because your website’s content is your “community builder”, “authority gainer” and “money maker”, it can either help or destroy your business. Valuable & relevant content is likely to attract readers and clients to your site, and thus increase sales. Furthermore, Google rewards rich and useful content that satisfies the user’s intent.

Content Planning

The first step to promote your content is by writing it in a user and search engine friendly way. This involves an extensive keyword research, topic research, on-page post optimisation, an efficient usage of headings, images and many more. To identify trending content, consider using tools like BuzzSumo.

Ask Questions

By providing a post that asks questions to readers, you create a feeling in them that you are willing to listen & receive feedback. While these questions help you gather what your customers think of your products or services, they also give the customers the satisfaction that their opinion counts. Based on the feedback, you can then plan your next piece of content.

Strategies to promote your content

Blog Often

Blogging helps driving traffic to your website, especially from returning customers who are looking for new content. Even if your services or products haven’t changed, blogging often can still be a helpful means for content promotion. Blogging helps to build a more intimate relationship between you and your customers and is a strategy to keep your clients coming back for more. A regular stream of quality content is likely to broaden your reach, increase customer loyalty and improve the site’s authority.

Use Attractive Titles

Using attractive titles serve as an excellent means to achieve content promotion. This can be confirmed by an analysis of 2.7 million link-containing tweets by Dan Zarrella, a HubSpot’s social media scientist who found that 16.12% of link-containing tweets have more retweets than clicks. This is an indication that some people just read the titles and not the actual content itself. A great title will, therefore, win people’s attention and encourage them to share your content.

Repurpose your content

A plain text version of your post is usually not enough to gain exposure. Hence, consider repurposing your already made piece into a SlideDeck and Infographic.

There are a number of quality SlideDecks and Infographics directories that you can use to publish your repurposed piece.

SlideDecks

Add an engaging title, description and relevant tags.

SlideDeck Directories:

1. SlideShare
2. SlideSnack
3. SpeakerDeck
4. SlideBloom

Infographics

People perceive information better when it’s visually appealing. Hence, a quality infographic can be a good way to get shares and extra exposure. Publish an infographic on your site and consider adding an embed code to make it easier for people to use your infographic on their sites.

Infographic Directories:

1. Visual.ly
2. Infographics Showcase
3. Infographics Archive
4. SlideShare – Yes, Slideshare also allows publishing infographics 🙂

Use Content Communities

Don’t just create an account to share your own stuff. Make sure to engage, upvote content, submit other articles and interact with the community.

Some content communities to share your piece:

1. GrowthHackers
2. Inbound
3. Hacker News
4. StumbleUpon
5. Reddit
6. Digg

Share and make it shareable

There are two main components to this point:

1. Share your new piece across social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Schedule 10-20 social posts with different titles, images, snippets, descriptions and stats. Roll out these social posts over a period of 2-3 weeks. You can accomplish this task with the use of scheduling tools like HootSuite or Buffer.

2. Make it a hustle free experience for people to share your content. Implement social sharing buttons in the post to allow visitors to spread your piece in a matter of a click.

You can also try to implement “highlight-to-share” function, just like we have on our blog.

Outreach

Getting your post shared by an influencer or a high-profile organisation can be challenging, to say the least. But, be ready to roll up your sleeves if you want to get more exposure and links.

1. Email influencers and companies you mention in the post. If you write something positive about their business, they will be willing to share your piece.
2. Reach out to influencers in your field. Use a tool like Followerwonk to search Twitter bios and find authorities in your area. Then, see if they have shared similar content and send them a Direct Message pitching your new post.
3. Find websites that link to similar content. First of all, identify similar content to the one you’ve created. Then, use tools like Open Site Explorer to identify websites that link to that piece and reach out to them with your post.
4. Tag mentioned influencers on Twitter and Facebook. When rolling out Tweets and Facebook posts, ensure to tag authorities and websites that you mention in a post.
5. Join HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Journalists are always looking for expert tips & tricks on a particular topic. HARO is a platform that connects journalists and professionals (like you) to create great content.

Paid Discovery

Consider implementing targeted paid ads to promote your new piece of content.

1. Targeted Facebook Ads. Select your target audience, demographics, location and interests.
2. StumbleUpon Ads. Relatively cheap way to get a lot of traffic to your post within a few minutes.
3. Sponsored Tweets. With sponsored tweets, you stand a chance of reaching a huge audience, as people have the option to retweet your post.
4. Outbrain Ads. Outbrain is a system that’s purely designed to promote content on other sites by placing sponsored links on popular online publications. So, don’t be surprised if your post gets promoted on CNN.

There are quite a lot of different ways to promote your content in addition to the ones mentioned above. These points should give you a solid foundation when developing a strategy to promote your next article.

All of these, by no means, are easy to implement. Hence, be prepared to roll up your sleeves (if wearing a shirt) and get your hands dirty and eyes tired.