The Best Way To Promote Your Blog Posts
One thing that non-bloggers can never understand, is how much time and effort it takes to promote one blog post. When it comes to blogging, promotion is always where I tend to fall down. It's an extremely important area that I never seem to have enough time for.
Luckily, these days we have a plethora (fancy word alert!) of social media scheduling applications to help us with the social media side of things, but even then, you still need to make time to get on there and schedule all of your social posts for all of your social media channels.
Finding the time can be tricky but once you have established a routine for blog posting and promotion, it's a lot easier to keep on track.
When should I promote my blog posts?
As soon as my post has gone live, I use Buffer to schedule all my social posts for Twitter and Facebook. My posts are usually scheduled for 8am BST so when I get into work around 8:30am I like to spend that half an hour, before starting my 9-5 work, to get all my social posts written up and scheduled for the day.
I will have 3 tweets scheduled for the times of day when my traffic is most active (I find this out in Google analytics) and then I will schedule 1 Facebook post promoting my new content. All of this is done within the space of 20 minutes.
It's important to know what times of day your traffic is most active, because it also gives a good indication of when people are online and looking for new content. If they are online, the likelihood is they are on at least one social media platform.
What Social platforms should I be promoting my content on?
A while ago I wrote a whole post on which social media platform is best for you depending on what type of content you produce, so I won't delve into a massive amount of detail in this post. But my 3 main social platforms of choice, and the ones I gain the most traffic from, are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Facebook is dying a death in my opinion, but I still get a lot of traffic through posting my links and tagging those posts correctly. I also like to use it as a more community platform and if you follow me on Facebook, you'll see that I like to share other peoples helpful and interesting blog posts as well as my own.
Twitter is by far my biggest bringer of traffic, I try and keep my promotional tweets to a minimum, but once someone retweets your link you're reaching a whole new audience and that is awesome. Much like Facebook, I also like to interact with other bloggers and share their posts that I've found helpful.
Pinterest is a bit of a new one for my blog, but I have noticed it entering my top 5 sources of traffic these past couple of months. It is one of the fastest growing social media platforms out there and is a complete life saver for a lot of bloggers. All you have to do is add a 'pin it' button to your blog and start pinning your posts or videos to your own boards!
Where else can I promote my content?
There are so many ways to promote your content that don't include the typical social media routes. It all depends on how much time and energy you wish to throw into your promotion. However, I would highly recommend you add your blog to readers such as Bloglovin and Feedly, I notice that these are the main two RSS readers that people use to keep track of my blog according to my analytics.
Adding your content to RSS readers like Reddit, Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon always give you an extra edge and more of a chance of your content being seen by a wider audience. They are all super easy to add your content to and usually only require a push of a button to share your posts. This strategy is called seeding, you are planting the seed of your content and the mentioned platforms help to grow and nurture it.
Promotion demands a huge chunk of your time, so the best way to make sure you're ticking all of your boxes is by setting some time aside when you're writing your posts and scheduling them, to do the same for your social posts. Once your post is live, take 30 minutes to run through your social and RSS feeds and push your content onto every single one possible in that time frame.
Promotion is an area that always gets neglected when a blogger has limited time, but without it, the people of the internet will never know about the awesomeness you've just created! Create a checklist of blogging things to do on your post days and start ticking off those boxes.
