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Promoting Your Blog for Maximum Reach

Knowing how to promote your blog post is as important as creating high-quality content. It’s important to position yourself in the industry and develop a strong relationship with your followers so that your readers are already interested when your content is published. Putting an emphasis on your blog posting does not just drive readers and potential readers to your articles, but it can drive traffic to your website, increase your SEO and position your brand as an expert in your industry.

Dear…x, y, z?

Who exactly are you writing to? Mostly men? Mostly women? Generation X or Generation Y? Do they have children? Where do they live? What is their educational background?

Before you put pen to paper you have to create a buyer persona. These important questions verify exactly who your demographic is. This will affect the platform you choose for sharing, what you write and how you write your message in order to appeal directly to your audience. The strongest buyer personas are created through market research. Never assume anything about your audience, run surveys, ask questions on social media or email users for feedback. Who is better to tell you about your customers and why they have chosen your product or service than your actual customers.

Hubspot offers a pretty good template to graph your buyer persona. If you are completely new to this area, they also offer a free inbound marketing course.

Tracking

The next step still isn’t writing or promoting. It is tracking and it is super important. You have to track and analyze the results! Without tracking you don’t know how well a campaign is doing compared to another, or what content is reaching your target demographic. You’re just creating and sharing without optimizing your process.

Our sister company, ClickMeter has a WordPress plugin and this is what we use to track our effectiveness. We determine the popularity of a blog post by how many unique views we get and if those views are coming from our target audience or not.

Next, we look at the conversion rate. What counts as a conversion is totally up to you, but usually, it will be something like when a visitor makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or requests a demo. The success of an article should be calculated by dividing conversions and views to get the conversion rate and then you can compare the success of your blog posts.

Intriguing Writing

Entice the reader, make an impact, give context and add value! Stick to those rules and you’re on to a winner .

Each article or blog post should have a benefit to both you and your reader. Bonding with readers around something completely unrelated to our product won’t get us far and won’t result in conversions. It would also bear no relevance to what our data has suggested our customers are interested in and listening to your readers’ wants is important.

Searchability

Promote your blog post naturally by making it easy to discover when people search for similar content. If you are using WordPress, the Yoast SEO tool will give you tips on how to improve your blog post for SEO.

I try to use one main keyword in the title, first paragraph, metadata and then at least 3 times throughout the article. In this article, I choose the keyword ‘promote your blog post’. Usually, I also pick a secondary keyword. For this article, I picked ‘promoting your blog post’, which is similar to the main keyword, and used it where possible. Repeat your keywords 3 to 4 times depending on the length of the article. The Yoast plug-in will let you know if you’ve used it too much, or not enough. In addition to this, you can add keywords to tags, images, and your URL slug.

Assuming that you are writing in a similar sphere all the time, you should add a recommended reading section of similar articles to your post. That might be throughout the article or at the end with a ‘You Might Also Like’ or ‘Further Reading’.

Social Media – Share Don’t Spam

Social Media is about connecting people, having a conversation and listening to what others have to say. It’s not a loudspeaker you can shout into and everyone has to take notice.

Hashtag – but use the right hashtag. Don’t just use popular hashtags that bear no relevance to your product. That would be like getting a loudspeaker and announcing great offers on car insurance at Disney on Ice. Sure thousands of people will have heard your message, but how many of them care? Write a list of your possible keywords then do some research on a tool like RiteTag to see if they are keywords that will get you seen. From there, it’s happy hashtagging!