How to promote your blog and get more traffic to the content

My last few posts were all about blog-related things, covering everything from why your company needs a blog and how to get started to what makes a great blog post and how to keep generating new ideas for content.

In terms of meeting potential and current clients, building your authority and SEO, I hope these articles have inspired you and shown the many advantages of blogging.

Of course, the moment that you hit 'publish' on a new post, blogging doesn't end. Many individuals make this mistake, but there's still work to do, in fact. You need to let your audience know that new content has been produced by you and where they can find it.

In today 's blog, we will look at:

• How your blog can be promoted
• How to get indexed by Google for your blog
• Bringing as much mileage out of the current content as possible

How your blog can be promoted

Ideally, the editorial calendar for your blog should provide a checklist of when and when to advertise a new post to ensure that as many individuals as possible see it. For different audiences, distinct approaches will perform. Here's a couple to try:

1. Post your latest blog post on your profile on Facebook

Post a connect, short intro and call-to - action to your Facebook business page when you write a new blog article. You might also have a sign-up for your email, telling people that they never need to miss an article again by entering your mailing list.

Linking to your new blog on Facebook a couple of times a week, as well as sharing links to old posts that people might have missed, is perfectly OK. Try to take out key points from the blog and use them as weekly statuses to create some interest and discussion around the topic.

You can spread content over weeks and months without having to be in front of Facebook every day by using Facebook's scheduling tool (or a third party social media campaign tool like Missinglettr).

2. Share your post with groups on Facebook

You may also want to post a link to your blog if you are an active member of any Facebook community that includes your target customers. Some Facebook groups have specific guidelines on the posting of promotional posts (e.g. Social Sunday) so it is necessary to take notice of this and stick to the rules to prevent the admin of the community from falling foul.

I suggest finding out the Facebook groups where you are most involved and adding to your editorial calendar their promo days.

3. Do A Live on Facebook

During the last few years, Facebook Live has sky-rocketed in popularity. Facebook Live videos produce six times as many interactions as traditional videos at the time of writing (October 2020), and attract ten times more comments. People can also spend three times longer than pre-recorded videos viewing Facebook Lives.

Hopping on to a Facebook Live and telling people about your latest blog post can be useful, taking out the key points and talking about them a bit more. This offers your audience the chance to get to know you in a live, raw and unscripted way and to see you sharing your expertise.

4. Tell your friends and family via your personal social media profiles about your latest content

How much do your family and friends know about what you're doing? Although sharing all of your content on your personal social media accounts may not be acceptable, an occasional share may help to remind your loved ones about your business.

You never know, they may have individuals who will enjoy your goods and services in their larger networks. To prompt any referrals, an occasional shout out to your blog might be enough.

5. Your blog tweet

To promote a new blog post, there are many ways you can use Twitter. You can let people know by tweeting a link once the blog goes live. Using a connection shortening service such as bitly.com to allow full use of the restricted characters (currently 280 max.), to create a simplified, bespoke URL for your new post.

You should schedule soundbites (including those with pictures) from your blog with the shortened URL during the week so that as many individuals see it as possible. Try many different soundbites and pictures, so that people who might not be interested in one are ignited by another by their curiosity.

For example , when a new blog goes live, you could write 12 unique tweets that you publish over the first 12 days and then you could recycle one every month for the next 12 months to keep promoting the same blog. Every time a new article is written, you'd then replicate this model.

Click to Tweet and Better Click to Tweet are both great plugins when you have a WordPress website. These build feature boxes of tweets you've pre-written inside your blog that take out key points from the post. As the name suggests, individuals just click to tweet-these boxes look attractive, stand out while reading skim, and do the job of writing the tweet for your followers.

Try adding targeted hashtags to any tweets you write about your blog while we're on the subject of Twitter. That way, if they search for the hashtag too, you can search for people who use the same hashtag and your blog will come up. This can be a fast route to having a blog discussion.

6. Pin up your Pinterest blog

Even if you don't have an obviously 'pinnable' company, I've blogged about using Pinterest in the past. The perfect example of content that you can add to Pinterest is a new blog post, even if you don't sell things. Simply build a board for your blog and pin this board to any new article you publish.

Make sure you have Rich Pins activated to allow people to pin your blog to their own Pinterest boards.

7. Publish a link to your LinkedIn article

You may also post a link to it as your LinkedIn status and to any related LinkedIn groups to which you belong any time you write a blog article.

One of the advantages of this technique is that it guides traffic to your website from LinkedIn. The best times to post on LinkedIn are 8-10am and 4-6pm, according to the Social Media Examiner.

Alternatively, as a way to expand your audience on the website, you can post articles directly to LinkedIn. This is a type of syndication of material, which I'll touch on a bit more below. However, be sure to read my in-depth Web Content Syndication Guide for the inside scoop on all things content syndication-related.

8. Promote your Instagram blog

Every single month, about one billion users are active on Instagram, with the average user spending 28 minutes a day on the site. These are only two of the reasons why your blog marketing needs to include Instagram.

Any easy ways to follow and promote your Instagram blog are:

Link your Facebook business page with your Instagram account (click here to find out how)

From all of your other social media pages, connect to your Instagram

Add the URL for the most recent blog post to your bio on Instagram

Capture your new blog on screen and then edit the branding picture (a free tool like Canva will help you do this)

Add a summary and related hashtags (up to 30) to the screenshots of your blog post. The description may be up to 2,200 characters, but it's the first 155 that appear in the news feed, so try to convey the meaning of your post in those opening words

Alternatively, build a branded text-based image that tells people that a new blog is live-this is an example of a post I shared on Instagram when I published the story behind my company (note that URLs in the comments are not live links, but, as described above, you can add a link to your latest blog in your bio)

Build and share several posts about your newest blog as an Instagram story

9. In your newsletter, feature the article

Building a mailing list of 'warm' leads, i.e. people who have shown an interest in hearing more about your products or services, is one of the most important things you can do for your company.

It takes between seven and 27 'touches' with a company before people become customers, experts say. This is an ongoing incentive to contact your mailing list to inform them of what you have to say if you send out a daily e-newsletter, whether weekly, fortnightly, monthly or even quarterly.

Including your blog posts is a smart way to add value to your newsletter. You may want to present the opening paragraphs or a teaser in your newsletter about the article with a link to your website where you can read the article in full. This is a useful tactic to push repetitive, high-quality traffic back to your website.

Alternatively, in your newsletter you should include an entire article (although this might not be as ideal for longer guides).

You can also send e-newsletters for free (depending on the size of your mailing list) with email marketing services like Mailchimp and Sendinblue.

10. To announce your new material, send out emails

You can also send out a dedicated email to your mailing list each time you post new content instead of featuring your articles in a newsletter.

Your email can be kept quick, something like:

Hello there, hey there,

On the SEO+ blog, I just wanted to share the new post.

You could then have some insights into the material or pose questions that could draw the attention of the reader. For instance:

Do you struggle to come up with new ideas for material for your blog? Do you need help preparing the content of your blog so that you always know what and when to publish?

Your audience will love to learn, plan out 12 months of content TODAY and publish regularly on time by reading this post to discover blog topics. This you should do!

For this form of newsletter, the goal is to illustrate what the viewer is going to get out of reading the blog. How are they going to benefit? How, in some way, can their lives look better? Oh, tell them.

I've recently found that a lot of organizations are transitioning to plain text emails, having in the past sent highly visual HTML-enhanced emails. This appears to contribute to better rates of clicking-through.

Don't forget that your email marketing program should show you who has emails about your blog and hasn't opened them. Later in the week, you could still send a second email to non-openers to try to reach them, using a different subject line, for example.

11. In all your social media bios, add a link to your most recent post.

Above, in your Instagram bio, I've already suggested adding a link to your new post, but you can take the same approach to all your social media bios. Simply alter the URL in your bio any time you post a new article.

12. Add a link in your email signature to your newest blog

Your email signature is also a perfect place for your new blog to be promoted. It can serve as a gentle reminder of your content to current and new contacts.

13. Reply to questions on Quora and Reddit

To find the answers to their questions, many individuals use websites like Quora and Reddit. You can add a link to your reply if your blog addresses a specific question.

You could also look at posting to industry-specific forums and sharing your recent blogs (as long as this follows the rules of the forum) on related threads.

Typing "intitle: forum" + into Google like this is a top tip for finding forums relevant to your field:

14. Add your blog to sites for social bookmarking

Some individuals like to find blogs to read on social bookmarking sites, such as:

Mix (A famous bookmarking site that has now migrated to Mix was StumbleUpon)

Digg Digg

Wallet Pocket

Heart It We Heart

Scoop.it a Scoop.it

AllTop

-- site has different criteria for submission, but it's worth investigating if these sites could be used by your audience.

15. On a podcast, support it

Podcasts will provide a great forum for talking about a new blog post, whether you record and publish your own or you can secure a guest spot on someone else's.

As with guest blogging, it will allow you to meet a new audience with an interest in your products or services by talking about your blog as a podcast guest.

How to get indexed by Google for your blog

As well as taking the above steps to promote your blog, through organic internet searches, you would want as many people as possible to find it.

This is the SEO side of blogging that should involve a mix of on-page, off-page and technical SEO, as with all web content.

You need a search engine to add it to the 'index' (i.e. content list) before a blog can show up in organic searches. This, by indexing, is what we mean.

Search engines such as Google essentially use search 'spiders' or 'web crawlers', a type of bot that goes through websites searching for content that can be catalogued and probably shared with searchers.

Google uses its algorithms once the content has been indexed to determine whether, when and where to list it in response to a relevant search.

The faster the indexing of a new blog post, the faster you can see it in organic searches.

So your next task is to let Google know the existence of your new blog.

You would need to do one of two things in order to do this:

For the first time, get your whole website / blog indexed

Let Google know that your present and previously indexed site has been added with a new URL

How do you know if you have already indexed your site?

To see what results come up, the best way to check whether Google has already indexed your site is to type site: yourdomain.com in the search bar. When I search my own site, here's what happens:

This brings up 222 search results at the moment, all web pages from the website SEO+. If I didn't already know, this would be proof that my blog has been indexed by Google.

If a website has not been indexed, a screen will be shown by Google stating that no documents matched your search.

Verify the Google Search Console site

If your blog / website is new and has not been indexed before, before doing anything else, you'll need to review your Google Search Console website.

Send a Map of the XML Site

You will be able to upload a site map to your Google Search Console once your website has been checked. Literally, a site map is a web page that shows all the pages / URLs on your website that can be found.

It will cross check its list of your URLs against those on your site map every time Google crawls your site, and index those that it doesn't already have.

You can create a site map using a plugin, such as Google XML Sitemaps or Yoast SEO, if you have a WordPress website.

Google provides guidance about the various site map formats and general instructions for creating and uploading a site map if you don't have a WordPress site.

Until you have created a map of a site:

In the main Google Search Console menu on the left of the screen, click Sitemaps under the Index heading.

Enter the URL for your sitemap under Add a New Sitemap.

Select Submit. Click

As Google Fetch

If Google already knows your website and has indexed all your previous content and you follow the promotional strategies that I have suggested in this post, you will find that your new blog article is easily spotted and indexed by the search engine.

However, it is worth monitoring the situation, as new content can take weeks or even months to crawl. Generally speaking, the more often you publish new content, the more likely your website will begin to be indexed by Google.

You can manually prompt Google to index a new URL if you want to accelerate the process and not leave it to chance.

To do this, go back to Google Search Console, and from the left-hand menu, click the URL Inspection option.

This will pull up a top-of-the-page search bar where you can enter your latest blog post URL.

Google will then return any information, including whether it has been indexed, that it has on the URL. You can click on the Request indexing button to get Google to index the new page if it doesn't. Although the search engine would not commit to a particular timeline, within 24 hours, people frequently see URLs that were submitted manually via Google Search Console appearing in Google searches.

Any time you update it, remember to have Google crawl a page or re-index it.

How to get as much mileage out of your current content as possible

Without talking about how you can make the most of your current content, I don't want to end this blog. This is something ignored by so many bloggers.

While creating fresh content is important, I would encourage you to keep revisiting the content you already have because this will help you make the most of your budget for blogging / marketing.

Note, all the time, you can hopefully attract new customers to your business. Any of your most famous content could have been missed by these individuals. Indeed, even your most loyal clients can not see anything you write, thanks to social media algorithms. This is why continuing the promotion of old posts, as well as new ones, is OK.

So, how is it possible to make the most of your old content?

First, check out my article: 39 ways to get more out of your current content mileage

Then: the:

1. Refresh your content and refresh it

Things change and blogs can shockingly easily fall out of date. To check what you may need to refresh, rewrite or even erase, it's worth performing a content audit at least once a year.

Edit the blog and post a revised version to the same URL if a subject needs updating. To the post, you can add a note saying when it was first published and when it was revised. If you have written other content relating to an existing blog since then, you can add internal links to the new content to help tie similar topics together (throughout this post, you will find that I have done that).

2. Links function both ways,

Equally, you can provide links to the older, linked material in the article if you write a new blog article that is related to a subject you've blogged about in the past. This will help visitors to your website read deeper about and around the subject and is a perfect way to add value, keep them on the site and introduce them to blogs that they may not have yet found.

3. Share links to your old social media blogs

Post links on your social media accounts, profiles and communities to previous posts so that they are seen by new fans and followers who may have missed them in the past.

4. Connect buttons for social networking to your blog

I suggest adding social sharing options in order to give your blog posts mileage for a long time to come. On WordPress, with plugins such as Social Warfare, you can do this. Links to social media buttons allows readers to share with their own networks the material they have enjoyed.

5. Your content syndicate

Syndication of content can be such a effective way to use the current content that I have recently devoted a whole guide to how to do it.

Through content syndication platforms such as Medium, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others, you can carry your blog posts to numerous new audiences.

So, you've got it there. Hopefully, you are now armed with ideas to promote your blog and get as much mileage as possible from your content.

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