If you think the hardest work with blogging is coming up with the ideas and getting those ideas down on the page in a sensible and meaningful order, think again. Promotion of your work can take as much effort and mental energy again. Not only do you need to engage in the physical activity of promoting your blog on social networks, or of syndicating it, you should also spend time on keyword research and on engagement – both of which I explain below.
Keyword research
As I have written previously, keyword research can boost your evergreen content – if you know what phrases people use when searching on Google, you can tailor your writing for maximum effect. This is what you might call pre-promotion. Knowing the right keywords can help you write great headlines, which will suit both search engine visibility and social media sharing. Let’s say, for example, you are writing blog content about how to find cheaper car insurance. You can do keyword research to find out which phrase people use the most when searching on Google – is it ‘cheaper car insurance tips’ or ‘how to get cheaper car insurance’? Do they use the phrase ‘car insurance’ more than ‘auto insurance’?
Promoting on social networks
You should be active on social media networks. You can share a link to your blog posts on your Facebook profile (or page, if you have one), your Twitter account and on LinkedIn as well as Google Plus, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and other social bookmarking sites. Your great headlines should do the work of selling your articles but remember to also use action words, which can encourage other people to share your content or at least click through to read it (eg, ‘Please retweet’ or ‘Please share this’ or ‘Let me know what you think’).
If your content is video based then it’s a good idea to post it on a YouTube channel and then share it from there into your blog post and share the content from there or from YouTube direct. If you are using great images, you can set up a Flickr gallery, as well as a gallery on Facebook or Google Plus; share the images on Pinterest, Pinspire, Weheartit or any number of social pinboards.
Promoting your content on social networks helps to gain visitors directly, but it also helps the search engines see your content being linked to in a number of places (and hopefully by lots of people, which then gives your articles more authority).
Engage with your audience
If you are lucky enough to receive genuine comments on your blog (ie, from people who aren’t just spamming), respond to them in the blog but, if appropriate, follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn, if you can see who they are. If they liked one of your articles, there’s a chance they may retweet or share another one, and even more so if you are engaging them in conversation occasionally on social networks. Growing your conversational relationships is a good way to encourage people to share your articles with their friends – as a favour if nothing else.
This approach to site promotion is like pushing a boulder up a hill. At first you are doing it alone and the hill is very steep, but persevere – encourage people to like you and want to help you – and it will soon be a lot easier and the boulder will roll faster.
Syndication
You can syndicate your content in a number of ways. Syndication is not bad as long as you remember that Google doesn’t like to show too many copies of the same content, so you should always try to ensure any syndicated copies of your articles contain a link back to the original, so that Google knows which is the official one.
Blog promotion directories.
There are some well respected directories of blogs which you can link up with, including Technorati, Blog Catalog, BlogBurst, My Blog Log, Feedburner and Business 2 Community. Some of these will allow you to post articles or they will syndicate articles from your RSS feed.
Read the previous articles in this series
1. How to write a blog: Knowing your audience
2. How to write a blog: Hatching article ideas
3. How to write a blog: Headlines that work
