So you’ve just finished and then posted your latest greatest brand spanking new Blog Posting. You’re extremely proud and excited that you’ve shared your thoughts and ideas based on your expertise with the virtual world. But after you hit the “Publish” button, you’re thinking that “my work is done,” Well, No it’s not!
For the majority of companies and marketers who are hoping on developing a regular routine in providing compelling content as well as creating social engagement marketing, blogging is the primary adopted method to do so.
Maintaining a strong updated marketing or corporate blog can pay huge dividends in increasing customer retention as well as better search engine rankings for your primary site. But what most forget is the “after the blog post” SEO marketing portion of content distribution.
Your Excellent Relevant Content May Just Go Unnoticed
So most of us are thinking that once we do hit that “Publish” button on a brand new post, that the job is complete, the traffic will come streaming in.
Now you’re just sitting back expecting that all of the major search engines as well as the social media outlets will automatically be sending you ‘cash in hand’ hungry consumers with their PayPal accounts in their back pocket, running straight to your waiting shopping carts. Well, if you’re still waiting, then realize it’s not going to happen.
In actual reality, there may only be a few readers who know that your blog and your new post even exists. The search engine spiders will eventually index that post, so it can then begin competing for search-engine positioning along with the potentially millions of other web pages which happens to provide the same exact content. Although your post may be absolutely groundbreaking, Google or Bing and friends may not notice you for months.
Rather than just relying on what the search engines along with a handful of your loyal subscribers can do to pump up your visitor count, content publishers also need to firmly establish syndication connections as well as planning for additional targeted promotions ensuring that each piece of unique blog content that you post gets the appropriate love by all the key sources who reaches your ideal end consumer.
Starting May Be The Most Difficult
As with anything else in life, starting or doing something for the very first time, such as the following blog promotion steps may be tough as well as too time consuming. This includes initially setting up the accounts, getting to know the various interfaces and the functions on the variety of the social media sites can get extremely time consuming. But it will get easier.
There are bloggers who will dedicate up to an hour of blog promotion directly after each new post, it’s that important. The best way may be to just outsource the majority of these tasks by using Fiver for example.
The key is to incorporate all of this promotional effort as part of your blogging process. It’s unfortunate when bloggers put in a lot of time as well as effort into creating excellent solid relevant blog content, develop excellent editorial processes and consistently publish great material, but then they just don’t do anything after that. They think that their work is finished once the content article is posted on their blog.
Methods Of Promoting Your Blog Posts After You Post
Search Engine Optimization Utilizing Keyword Integration
You may be thinking that your content is excellent, but with doing a little bit of concentrated keyword research along with integration can potentially have a huge impact on direct search engine rankings as well as traffic.
So scan through your blog content and then try and pick out the main topics which are covered in your post. Plug those keyword terms and phrases into Google’s Free Adwords’ keyword suggestion tool. Take notice of what the most popular search terms are along with the listed variations of wording and phrases.
Go back to your original content and then try to beef up your post such as, the title, the content, its meta description and the tags by using those popular terms and phrases.
Syndicate By Syndication
Absolutely the most powerful as well as one of the most misunderstood mechanisms of a popular blog is its RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) allows you to be able to automatically feed the content of your blog postings into a variety of different places on the Web, this includes most of the prominent social media networking sites as well.
So when the URL of your RSS feed is plugged into your profiles or your social media networking sites, just hitting the “Publish” button on a new blog post will automatically initiate a “Push” of that new piece of content to those sites. This will significantly expand and increase your reach as well as saving you a lot of time posting the content manually.
One other great thing is that this is a one-time setup. Once you have established all of your RSS connections on the social media sites, you would not have to do it again. To begin, get your blog’s RSS URL and start plugging it into the following sources:
Facebook’s Business Page – Which is found in your applications area, look for the “Social RSS” application tab and set it up so it will publish your blog’s content directly on your Facebook wall automatically.
LinkedIn Profiles – For LinkedIn, locate the “Blog Link” or the “WordPress” tabs in the applications section on the profile page and then set it up so it will auto-post your blog content directly on your LinkedIn profile.
Also don’t forget to inform your employees or employer to do this as well. If you happen to have a large number of employees, the potential increase in your companies reach could be immense.
Ning Social Community – On the Ning platform, you will be able to plug in your RSS feed by using the “Add RSS” widget that’s located on your profile page.
Plaxo Networking – Although Plaxo may not be that well known or as popular, it is another excellent business orientated social networking site which makes it extremely simple to “Add a RSS feed,” which plugs into your blog’s content automatically.
Other Social Media Networking Sites – There are a variety of other social media based sites such as the most obvious, Twitter, which allows you to include your blog’s feed. Scour all of your sites for this option.
Shorten The URL Of Your Blog Post’s
These services are handy when posting your links on sites such as Twitter. URL shortening services also usually include detailed analytics, (click-through behavior tracking), when using these services. So posting by using a shortened URL on your social media sites is an excellent strategy.
How To Do This:
• Copy the URL of your new blog post and then paste it into an URL shorten site, these include Ow.ly, Bit.ly, Cli.gs etc.
• Copy that shortened URL and use it in any of your status updates or link postings
• You can then check your URL shorten site’s account for all of the click stats, including geographic areas and referring site data once the link has been active for a while
Performing Status Updates
Although doing this may seem quite obvious, it’s actually not that easy to do. What you can do is type the headline of your blog post into all of the social media site’s status boxes. Make sure that you use your shortened URL link. But doing this may not generate the most possible clicks.
Realize that all of the various social media sites are a little different in nature from each other. Differences such as: social etiquette, demographics and audience etc. So tailoring all of your headlines for each of the social sites could potentially make a difference.
You will also need to keep in mind that when you’re posting any new content via status updates, there’s only a small portion of your friends or followers who will actually be online at that exact moment that you post to be able to read it.
So to maximize the potential that your followers will see as well as read your new posting, you’ll be required to send multiple updates at different times on different days.
You may also be wanting to use different headlines every time you do so since there may be a potential of you possible getting banned from say Twitter, for sending the exact same posting multiple times which they frown upon.
If your content happens to cover multiple topics, then create a different status update for each of the topics and then spread them out over a few days. Make sure that you influence your followers to retweet or share the link as well.
Productivity Tip: There are a few excellent tools which are available allowing you to set up and then scheduling all of your updates anytime in the future, these service include: Twuffer, Hootsuite, Later Bro etc. You should be scheduling around four to five updates using different headline variations to be posted over the next week.
Using Content Teasers
The majority of the social media networking sites as well as the online forums usually allow for content promotion provided that it’s relevant and valuable to them, or is helpful to their community, and doesn’t include blatant obvious self promotion.
A few of the examples include:
• LinkedIn Answers
• LinkedIn Forum For Groups
• Facebook Groups
• Ning Group Forums
An excellent strategy is writing a compelling headline or a question as your title on a forum post, then include useful as well as thoughtful commentary then followed by including your shortened URL. Also, make sure that you ask your readers to provide feedback on your forum post as well.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Although using this technique doesn’t have the “punch” that it once had, but posting your content on all of the popular social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc., is still a great source for traffic and backlinks.
These social bookmarking sites can be viewed as peer-review content. If there are others who happen to bookmark your content, the more exposure you’ll get as a result. There’s also the opportunity that someone will link back to you or make reference to your blog’s content on their site.
Find And Comment On Other Similar Blogs
If you can provide helpful as well as valuable comments on other related blogs, it can be a good way to generate additional traffic, develop new relationships while developing new followers and gaining backlinks.
So if you’ve just made a new blog post on a particular topic, you can then do a quick search and find other similar blog posts on related topics. Find out if the other blog posts are lacking information which you may have covered in your blog post.
Then add your viewpoint, but make sure it’s genuine and non self-promotional. If the comment form requests the URL of your post, by all means include it.
Search And Then Help On Twitter
Providing valuable assistance is an excellent way of building a loyal community of Twitter followers. So go on Twitter and perform a search such as: “how to promote my site.” When you look at the resulting tweets, there should be several opportunities in which you would be able to somehow help.
Reply by giving out some genuine advice and make sure that you use the shortened URL. The result will most often be a new Twitter follower or even a new subscriber to your blog.
Using Email Signatures
Another excellent technique is adding the headline of your latest blog post in your email signature. Most of the email platforms now has excellent apps to do this, such as Wisestamp for Gmail for example, which pulls the headline of your latest blog automatically into your email signature. You can do it manually as well if you need to. You never know when a potential prospect or vendor might read a post which opens up a conversation.
Sharing Your Post With Targeted Customers
You’ve just created a brand new blog post which you know would help certain customers or groups of people. So what you can do is send them an email message using the shortened URL along with a note such as, “Thought this post would really help your marketing.” You can then check the URL’s analytics to see if they decided to click on it.
Add Your Blog Posts To Your Newsletters
If you have a company newsletter, then you should be automatically incorporating at the very least, portions of your blog content. Try including a few of your post headlines and then see which of them gets the most clicks. You may decide that you’ll need some follow-up blog posts on certain topics which received the most attention.
Asking Fellow Bloggers To Mention Your Posts
Go out and build networking relationships with other fellow bloggers in your niche and ask them to either blog about or link back to your new post. This can be an excellent way to expand your current reach. Reciprocate promotional offers and efforts can potentially have a great payoff in gaining high quality natural backlinks resulting in you jumping up in the search engine rankings as well as subscribers.
Obtaining Trackable Results
If you’ve decided on using any of the URL shortening sites and also have the analytics installed on your blog, you should eventually see all of your hard work eventually paying off. You should be able to see increased spikes in visitor traffic along with conversions the very day that you promote a new post.
You can then multiply this if you make a blog post or two every day and then that visitor “spike” is no longer a spike. It will eventually turn into a constant source of free traffic. Also, your goal should be getting significant increases in your rankings, increasing the opportunities as well as overall conversion.