Writers just starting a blog may think traffic miraculously arrives after publishing an article. The reality is that bloggers spend as much time (or more) promoting a post as they do writing it. The goal of content promotion is to ensure your article is read from as many places as possible. The key is posting in the right places where people look for your offerings and answers.
Connecting to a reading audience and customers is the blogger’s priority. Getting articles posted on numerous targeted websites and social networks makes it possible, but requires effort with little return. Successful bloggers know who their audience is.
With a clearly identified audience, online writers gain not just a steady flow of readers. Instead, writers gain readers who identify with the content, the challenges and answers covered. A clear audience also creates a content source. Through interactions with the writer, a clearly identified audience brings up challenges and questions for the niche content area.
Writers need to quickly answer these key questions to begin:
Quora is a great place to start for writers with new blogs. Anyone can set up an account by providing an email address, selecting a set of topics (interests) to follow, and beginning to view and interact with posts and other posters. Then Quora becomes a blogger's topic generator.
See what questions and answers relate to the blog. Once a feel and flow around the topic is clear, bloggers can write topics on these same themes and pique the interest of others with similar interests. Submitting answers to popular questions drives traffic to the blog.
If bloggers know the subject, and speak with clarity and knowledge, readers will upvote the posts and share blog articles. Writers with continued upvoted posts can appear highlighted as a top writer, gaining respect that increases blog visitors.
Reading and responding insightfully to many short-answer questions will help writers explore the target audience. As a result, the interactions increase the range of topics open to bloggers. And the blog posts can make real connections to readers, increasing site traffic.
Search engines provide a quick open-ended way to learn audiences. Begin by using broad search terms for the niche area. Remember, look for audience data, not just the subject. If a blogger restores classic automobiles, and wants to know about her target audience, a query for “classic car hobbyists”, returns information on car clubs, car shows, and newsletters. A blogger could quickly identify dozens of topics for a target reader audience. Search Engines such as Google also provide various information objects on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) in addition to the standard results:
An easy way to connect readers to a blog is to distribute a newsletter. Include a simple Call-To-Action (CTA) encouraging readers to sign up for a mailing list. Emailing interested customers is one of the most effective ways to get your blog post opened.
In addition to the main research and dissemination tools, blogging tools can also help analyze site traffic, design the images, layout, and content of the blog, or collaborate and organize all the content.
All these tools prepare bloggers to identify audiences, build a powerful site, and begin to produce content and reach readers and customers. So which places are outstanding for promoting your blog post? For one, Quora, which provides an excellent location to clarify the full breadth and different focuses of the target audience, is also a great outreach tool. The other platforms below all offer extensive reach, each with unique approaches and audiences to round out a blogs target audience,
One of the first places to actually share a blog is on Twitter. The social media network has changed a lot since its early days, and the way people use it has also changed. But it remains a place about news and the most current, highest trending topics or stories. It’s great for announcements and event updates, news and pop culture stories, and blogger/writer networking.
Of the six social media platforms with one billion active users, Meta owns four of them. Facebook has nearly 3 billion monthly active users. From a content marketing perspective, Facebook gives you greater audience targeting and market research than any other website, besides Google.
Instagram is like the cooler, younger brother of Facebook. It may not have all the same features as Facebook, but Instagram has become really popular with celebrities and younger audiences. It’s focused on visuals that can be scrolled through on smartphones. Because of this, quotes, food, selfies, and picturesque scenes such as concerts or mountain hikes, are the most popular content.
LinkedIn is known as the professional network, so there’s a lot of businesses and startup entrepreneurs. The advertising and corporate noise can be dizzying, so some people feel overwhelmed by posting. But if you provide value for readers, and build genuine relationships and partnerships in your LinkedIn network, it becomes a lot easier.
Share your content on LinkedIn Groups. There’s a group for almost anything, from colleges to engineering teams. Just be mindful about which one you join and when the best time to post is. Don’t just publish your blog on there, but get to know other people and engage with their content too.
Pinterest emphasizes visuals, just like Instagram. A majority of Pinterest is female, and like to shop online. This makes Pinterest great for DIY or cooking related posts, as well as product-based marketing.
Reddit calls itself the “front page of the Internet” and it’s not too far off. Unlike most social networks, Reddit relies on a voting system that makes popular content (links or text posts with the most “upvotes”) rise to the top, while spam falls to the bottom. In addition, Reddit capitalizes on various “subreddits” which are communities complete with moderators and themes dedicated to a particular topic, such as gaming, EDM production, or funny gifs. There’s a subreddit for everything.
Similar to Inbound, Growth Hackers is another marketing and entrepreneurship community with a voting system for each post. It costs extra to join Growth Hackers Projects, which is a more in-depth dashboard for your company’s testing and optimization purposes, but it’s free to post as long as you have a Facebook or Google account.
Flipboard is a popular news aggregator and curator, and just about anyone can make their own magazine. It’s especially popular among mobile users and provides a visually pleasing way to continue sharing interesting articles.
Medium has become a powerful network of writers and readers from all industries. Like a social network, Medium has its own curation algorithm, based on a number of factors, such as whether the reader follows the author, whether the reader follows the publication containing the story, and whether the reader follows one of the story’s tags.
Often content must be adapted (or reinvented) to match the chosen placement. After all, the content posted on Facebook should be very different than what is posted to Twitter. However, bloggers shouldn’t leave large audiences because of the platform medium.
All content is redesigned for chosen platforms, or in the case of YouTube, an entirely different modality. Written content is often repurposed in video–when authors give a summary of a book, when someone reads a speech. In the case of ebooks, an entire written work is translated to audio only. Visitors to YouTube and other video sites seek content, and they seek it in video format. However, the niche a blogger has chosen will have audiences familiar with various media forms and feel completely at home with strong written content repurposed.
Depending on a blogs content, a writer might see this channel as a bit of a stretch (or challenge). But the reality of TikTok’s shortened, eminently sharable format, is that popular content gets trafficked fast and wide. If a blogger focuses on a niche for cooking (food, recipes, processes, cuisine, etc.), the format fits well. If the content is restoration of classic vehicles, ditto. In fact, the top blog topics for 2022 easily translate to short, encapsulated videos: fashion and beauty, travel and personal, food, photography, DIY, political. Just as in Twitter, the content mode is brief, overview, a quick hit such as a quote or interesting fact, and a link to the blog.
Once you feel you’ve exhausted all your possible places of promotion, brainstorm some ways you can use your content again without actually sharing the exact same entity.
Always remember to engage the audience. Ask for feedback, post challenges, find out what they thought of the piece, and what they want to hear more of. You can also continually update your post if it’s a comprehensive guide, by including new information and resources (and making note of the additions at the top).
Finally, just as bloggers translate content across Tweets, Facebook posts, long-form blogs, and video, always consider reusing the exact same content in a completely different format. Try a webinar, an infographic, a podcast, or a downloadable PDF. There are many more options to try simply by searching a specific content topic and a modality (classic car restoration + infographic).
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