How to Promote Your Blog Content

As a business owner or even anyone in the marketing department, you probably know how crucial a company blog is for your business’s success. Blogging for business holds numerous benefits such as driving traffic to your website, answering questions your readers may have about your products or service, boosting your domain authority to rank higher on Google, and generating leads. However, you can’t enjoy those blogging advantages if you’re not properly promoting your blog content. Simply writing exceptional content just isn’t enough. No one will share or link to your posts if they never see them. This is where promoting your content comes in.

But, before you even begin promoting your content, it’s essential that you create quality content that’s worth promoting.

• Your content needs to be searchable. Before writing, complete some keyword research and a few Google searches to make sure you’re writing about a topic that people are actually interested in. Include popular keywords which people are already searching for, but that are not overly competitive. Create a few long-tail keywords using your main keyword as well.  

• Include visuals such as relevant pictures, infographics, videos, and other interactive content to break up your paragraphs, make the page look interesting, and keep your readers engaged. Too many words jumbled together appears overwhelming and viewers will lose interest quickly. Make sure to optimize readability and the flow of your post.

Now, let’s jump into promoting your blog content.

1. BUILD…

• relationships with others in related, non-competitive industries.

• a loyal audience.

• relationships with industry influencers.

There are a few ways you can accomplish this:

1. Share, comment on, and like others’ content.

2. Be human, not spammy.

3. Use social media to network and engage.

Following these steps will make the recipients of your content outreach and distribution more willing and likely to share or add links to your content.

2. Target Your Audience

In order to target your audience, you must first know your audience. Understand what content they want to read, common questions they might ask, similar posts they’ve read, shared, or linked to in the past, etc. There’s no use distributing or outreaching your content to audiences which aren’t interested; prevent this by fully understanding who your target audience is.

For example: I write and promote blog content for Skutchi Designs, a custom office cubicle manufacturer. So, why would I promote my content to college students? Instead, I’m searching for architects, commercial interior designers, and business owners.

3. Email Outreach

Email outreach is arguably the most important step in promoting content, but it can be a frustrating process. I might send out over 100 emails and receive two responses. However, this is how we get our content out there. Put together a list of potential sites in your industry, sites which post similar content, and industry influencers. I use Buzzstream for this process, but that’s up to you. Keep your outreach email short, sweet, and to the point. Tell the recipient what you can do for them. If they think that you’ve sent out hundreds of identical emails, they’re not interested; try to personalize each email as best as you can.

It’s also a great idea to distribute emails to anyone who you may have linked to in your blog post. Let them know that you enjoyed their blog post, infographic, video, etc. and you referenced it in your post. You’ll have a few people offer to share your post simply because you linked to them. I like to add at the end of these emails, “If you enjoy my post, feel free to share!” I’m not guaranteeing that this will increase your response rate; it’s just a personal preference.

4. Targeted Distribution

This point almost goes hand in hand with email outreach. Like I mentioned before, it won’t do you any good to just blindly send out hundreds of automated emails. Target a specific audience. Send emails informing your subscribers of new blog posts, your industry influencers (one share from them can more than double your exposure), and other related, non-competitive sites. Targeted distribution is relevant when promoting through social media as well.

5. SHARE on Social Media

Engage your audience when posting to social media. For example, ask a question or opinions to encourage comments. Be sure to share across multiple platforms to reach as large of an audience as possible. However, if you’re using forums or sites like Reddit, you want to avoid seeming spammy by only posting and promoting your own content. You must be active in the online community as well; sharing your opinion, commenting and liking others’ posts, and posting non-advertorial content as well.

Sharing your posts in relevant Facebook groups is a great way to get your content seen by people who are already interested in your topic and are likely to share it. Also, don’t be afraid to post, share, or retweet the same article multiple times. Post multiple times in intervals for anyone who may have missed it the first time.

Now that you know how to effectively promote your blog content, get to work on your next top-notch blog post. You won’t let it go unseen this time. Put yourself on the map with these simple and effective promotion strategies and watch your traffic expand. You’ll now be successfully writing and promoting blog content!